The Sea-Crossed Fisherman

by Yashar Kemal

  ‘There’s something strange today,’ Selim muttered, as though addressing the gulls. ‘Something out of the ordinary …’ And he fell back into his dreamy state. No fisherman should do that, ever, and certainly not with his line down in the water.

  Long white ships, heading for Istanbul or for the Çanakkale Strait, floated high above the sea, suspended in the brightness. Thus it is in such weather, when daylight melts into a vaporous haze. From a distance the ships appear to be hovering far up in the smoky sky. Perhaps, Selim thought, it’s the lodos wind coming. Perhaps …

  Suddenly his arm jerked. The boat, the sea, the gulls, everything reeled and he was almost swung overboard. In an instant, the gulls were thronging over the island’s point, wheeling crazily with piercing cries. Selim’s practised hands at once began to let out the line. This isn’t a fish, he thought as the cord slipped rapidly through his fingers, it’s a monster …

  What should he do when the line gave out? He must decide quickly. Should he run the engine and follow it quietly or should he let the fish pull the boat? The nylon cord was strong, no ordinary fish could break it. If this one had swallowed the bait whole, then it could tow the skiff as long as it liked, it would tire and surface in the end. Swiftly, he lashed the line to one of the bronze tholepins and felt at once how the boat was drifting along after the fish. From over Hayirsiz Island the gulls swooped down in a mad screeching swarm and began to fly above his boat, wing to wing.

  And so they sailed on, now more slowly, now gathering speed, the squalling gulls above dashing back and forth between the boat and the fish. After a while Selim noticed the line slackening. He picked it up. It was limp and floating on the water. His heart sank. Could it be that the fish had cut it and escaped? He pulled and pulled and still it came. Then without warning, as though the fish had been playing with him, the line tensed, he lost his hold and found himself sprawling on the prow. Before he could gather his wits, the boat was lurching and dipping dangerously. Water filled the keel and Selim, drenched, stunned, could only watch helplessly as the fish continued to drag the boat on with all its strength. Up down, up down went the prow, then the rolling abated and the line slackened again. Selim seized it and started winding it in, but on his guard now, very very slowly, and indeed there was a violent tug and the skiff speeded on inland towards Hayirsiz Island, though not so fast this time.

  This fish must be even larger than the one, the last of its kind, that Selim had been after all these months. Surely it must weigh three hundred kilos, maybe five hundred, and, no doubt about it, it was a swordfish. There could be no larger fish in the Marmara Sea, neither the big tuna nor the shark. Hurray, swordfish, he rejoiced. But the boat was heading steadily for the rocks of Hayirsiz Island. What if the damn creature drags the skiff on to those rocks, Selim thought. Should I run the engine? This fish is a sly one …

  As they neared the coast, Selim primed the engine, but just then the fish changed its course. Tracing a half-circle, it swam on ever more rapidly around the island. ‘It couldn’t break my line!’ Selim shouted, his heart pounding. ‘And it won’t. It’ll soon tire itself out.’ But the fear in him was shouting too. ‘It’s got the line taut to breaking, quivering, hissing … It’ll break … It can’t take any more.’

  What if it tugs the boat down, he thought with dread. His hands quivered as he strained and pulled in vain at the vibrating line. Then, no, he told himself, the boat’s too big, no fish, however large, can drag it down. Yet all kinds of fearful misgivings assailed him. There is no knowing how strong a fish may be. Even a little fish struggling on the end of your line will unexpectedly snap it and fly back into the water. It can sometimes have your large boat tossing as on a rough sea …

  Sighing, Selim revved up the motor and steered the boat carefully after the fish. And still it never loosened the line, nor lessened its speed. On it went, even faster now, on a perfectly straight course, neither plunging nor rising nearer to the surface. The sea, flat, blue, smooth, overflowing with sunlight, undulated gently beneath them. But for the whooping turmoil of gulls flying low between the boat and the fish, it was as though nothing untoward was taking place. Who knows what a great fish this was! Perhaps it wasn’t a fish at all … Whatever it was, it must be a brave, splendid creature. The line was stretching ever more tightly, so Selim revved up the motor, but the faster the boat went, the more the fish gathered speed.

  A little further in front of them, the sea was turning purple and beyond that was a white streak. The fish passed the purple stretch and struck against the current. This forced it to swerve east, towards Büyükada Island. It was going even faster now and the joy that had been welling up inside Selim burst into the open. It was a magic being, a miracle that he had before him, a creature that never tired, that never would tire even if they went on like this for days, an uncanny being.

  Suddenly, the fish must have paused, for the line sagged over the water. Selim grabbed the rudder, then hastily switched off the motor. The boat was nearly above the fish. Just then the fish gave a long pull, the prow dipped and straightened and the line became taut again. The fish had managed to get clear of the current. Selim felt a resurgence of joy. He seized the line and heaved, but the fish held fast. Then it must have given a toss of its head, for Selim was yanked forward and barely avoided being flung headlong over the prow. He felt a burning in his palms as the cord slid through his hands. The bronze tholepin vibrated as though it was being wrenched off. Rushing to the motor, he started it up again and steered after the fish. The line was still rigid, but the tholepin did not grate any longer.

  Stand fast, my lion, stand fast, was the mad scream rising inside Selim, though what he meant by that he did not know. The skiff circled Sedef Island and skimmed in front of a city-line ferry. White clouds rising from the north were gathering swiftly over the sea, swelling, brightening …

  Now they were sailing straight for Yalova, on the opposite coast. In the distance, a luminous patch on the sea, like a well of light, reflected the sun in blinding radiance. The sea smelled deliciously of the sun now. Selim’s hands hurt a little, but his whole body was alert, vibrant. That Halim Bey Veziroğlu, if he could be convinced that Selim would kill him – such old men hold their lives very dear – perhaps then he might surrender the land, perhaps without even taking any money … He must be made to feel fear, to believe Selim would kill him. And for that Selim had to believe it himself …

  The line slackened again. Was the fish diving? Down, down, down went the line under the boat, it tightened, the boat floundered, but not so badly this time, a sign that the fish was tiring. Selim felt a pang of pity. Surely it would not be long now before it surfaced and lay there, its white belly exposed in the air …

  But here it was, tugging again! The line straightened, a good part of it shot out of the water. Then it went limp. Again and again it tightened and loosened, water spurting up high all around. On they streamed, the sea beneath them now white, now green or mauve. Ahead, white waves were billowing and when they reached them the fish shook the boat again, then dived deep down, slowed and accelerated. And Selim followed its every move, rejoicing, losing heart, rejoicing again. He could not understand himself, sorry for the fish when it tired, relieved when it plucked up its strength …

  Now it was pressing on madly, the line steady and taut above the water. Never had Selim come across such a fish. Certainly he had hooked others and kept up the chase for four hours, five, seven even, tiring his game, bagging it in the end, but never one that could tow his boat as though it were no heavier than a nutshell. What if this one dragged him all over the Marmara for three days and three nights, what if he ran out of fuel and the fish, straining at the line, broke it at last and got away? Yet, if he caught it … The thought made him tremble with joy, but at the same time there was an ache in his heart.

  The gulls seemed to have gone mad. Back and forth they coursed from the fish to the boat, a whirling, tossing mass caught in a violent storm, their cries amplified to a fe
arful ululation. And the more they churned above, the faster went the fish. The shadows of the white clouds raced over the ever-changing surface of the water.

  Selim’s mind wandered from the fish to Veziroğlu, to the trees he had planted on that land, to the lofty Caucasus, to the flaxen-haired one in Cerrahpaşa Hospital, to the scent of her breasts, to the hazy domes and minarets of distant Istanbul city, while his practised hands mechanically steered the rudder according to the fish’s course.

  He was roused from his reverie by the sharp grinding of the bronze tholepin. They were opposite Hayirsiz Island again and the fish, straining with all its might, was swimming round the island. It’s going to break away, Selim thought, elated. Twice the fish circled the island, then it slowed down.

  ‘No fish, however strong, can sever this nylon cord, thick as a finger,’ Selim muttered despondently as he gathered in the slackening line. ‘It can’t get that huge hook out of its mouth either. It’ll never break away, never be free again, the poor thing …’ The fish seemed to have abandoned the fight. ‘Come, then, come, come to me,’ Selim murmured like a lament. ‘Come, sonny, prince of the high seas, come to me. How quickly you’ve surrendered in spite of your mighty size! Come, then, come quick …’

  But even as he spoke the fish revived. The line in the boat skidded back into the water and tautened, and they were circling the island once more, the boat tossing up and down, spewing white foam all around it. The madly screeching gulls swarmed over more thickly in a dizzy, jumbled whirl, their cries deafening now. Suddenly, the line tightened to breaking-point, water spurted from it and an enormous fish appeared on the sea, tensed like a bow, its back a rich radiant blue under the sun. Then the shimmerng mass sank back. Selim sat spellbound, but even before that glistening splendour had faded from his sight the fish flashed up again, drowning Selim, the boat, the water, the whole world in a radiant blueness. It arched and disappeared. The third time that huge glistening mass of blue rose to the surface, Selim was ready. With his sharp fisherman’s knife he slashed at the line. In the same instant the fish ducked, leaving a frothing ferment in its place. Selim’s arms fell to his sides. For a long time he stood staring after the fleeing fish, the deep-blue radiance still flashing through his head.

  When he came to himself the sun-drenched sea shone with a different brightness and a serene, quivering gladness enveloped him. He set the rudder for Menekşe and sank down, weary yet rested, light as a bird inside.

  What if the fish can’t get the hook out of its mouth? he was thinking as the boat slowly chugged on towards the coast. What if it swallows it? Will it die? Then, no, he told himself his heart trembling with joy, no hook can really hurt such a big fish. The flesh will form an envelope over it, that’s all. As for the line, well, it’ll find a way to cut it …

  Every old fisherman knows this from long experience.

  17

  From the Vegetable Market opposite Azapkapi Mosque to almost half-way across the Golden Horn a whole array of derelict Laz scows are moored, smelling of tar, clustering larboard to starboard, stern to bow, and it was in the murky, stuffy hull of an empty scow that they had slept, snuggled against each other, to be woken at dawn by the blaring of boat sirens. People lived here in these old scows, bachelors, seasonal and unemployed workers, all in perfect accord and particularly respectful towards the women. The drug addicts on the shore, the black-marketeers, the thieves and cutpurses had no place here. And all around was the huge miry swamp, the Golden Horn, nothing but a cesspit now, a garbage dump, full of carrion, dogs, cats, huge rats, gulls, horses, a stagnant sea with never a wave, its flow forgotten, bleakly reflecting the neon lamps, car lights and the dull hazy sunlight, strewn with deadwood and the sweepings of hundreds of kilos of vegetables, tomatoes, eggplants, oranges, leeks, melons and water-melons from the Vegetable Market, torpid, its surface skimmed with years and years of acid-stinking burnt oils from the surrounding factories, reeking with a noisome nauseating odour like no odour in the world.

  And now, weary, dirty, ghastly, the Golden Horn was waking together with the rest of Istanbul. And Galata Bridge and Unkapani Bridge were also slowly stirring, soon to become an inextricable tangle of cars, a maddening traffic jam lasting for hours, exuding a continuous odour of exhaust fumes, all veiled in a thin but stifling haze.

  Rowing-boats and motorboats, cleaving drearily through this thick water, were crossing from one shore to the other. Small steamboats passed under the bridges, folding back their long painted funnels. In the Kasimpaşa dockyard, ships’ hulls, stern to stern, extended to the middle of the Golden Horn. Here was a world of iron rust, forming a raddled slimy layer over the water. Blue blazing flares of blowtorches, razor-sharp, fulgurating, cut through the city, through its lights and ships and noise and rain. All the gulls of the Golden Horn were assembled here, a white blanket over the dome of Azapkapi Mosque and the red-tiled roofs of the houses and apartment buildings, slumbering in the first light of dawn. In a while, as the fishing craft arrived at the Fish Mart, they would wake, shrieking, and swarm down over the water and the incoming boats, diving at lightning speed after the fish thrown away by the fishermen.

  On the hills around the Golden Horn Istanbul town was waking too, its muddy, pot-holed streets strewn with garbage, rotting fruit, broken plastic objects, scraps of old shoes, the limbs of carcasses, bloody bones, its air viscid, poisonous, deathly … Soon the neon lights of the billboards over the buildings would go off and the Golden Horn would close in upon itself, drowned in dense factory smoke and fetid smells, the brief flashes of the welding torches and its weak lights fading into the day, and from Karaköy the city-line ferries would belch out their black smoke, spreading a lowering pall over sea and land.

  Zeynel and Dursun Kemal had woken up in this tarry hull on the miasmic Golden Horn, stiff, staring blankly at each other, all that had taken place the night before a blurred jumble in their heads.

  And in Istanbul city, people were killing, gouging each other’s eyes out, robbing banks, running, choking under pelting rain, choking with the ghastly corrosion, the sewers, the refuse heaps, falling on the garbage like screeching rapacious seagulls, crazed, a ravenous, despairing horde assailing the city. Half-naked tramps, itinerant vendors, small-time black-marketeers, murderers, rapists … And de luxe motor cars, elegant shops, painted bejewelled women, no longer human, smelling of mould … One single car selling for three million, an apartment for seven million … The rent alone sixty thousand lira … Gardens planted with flowers imported from far-off Japan, tended by gardeners also trained in Japan, villas, luxurious yachts, gambling dens … Black-marketeers selling smuggled cigarettes, whisky, electronic machines, spending money like water, shedding blood like water too … And the starving … Driven to suicide by hunger … Three hundred thousand prostitutes … The destitute, the homosexuals … And the police, present at every comer, in every brothel, extorting bribes, killing like any other network of thugs, letting murderers off scot-free and laying the blame on their victims, swinging their truncheons and shooting in blind frenzy not at the killers and racketeers, but at the slain, the underdogs … All intermingled, the jewels, the furs, the hunger, the dirt, the sewers, the nightclubs, the haggling, the trafficking in human flesh … Corrupt, the Golden Horn, ever since bygone Byzantium, the people, the carrion, the factories, the filth, the nakedness … Corrupt, Beyoğlu, Galata, the merchants, the Genoese tower, the buying and selling, the glittering Ottoman gold coins … Corrupt, a medieval city always and for ever, until the day it wastes away and goes to ruin … And; wallowing in mud, the squatters, fleeing the country in droves from hunger and want … Zeytinburnu, the pocket-sized dwellings of clapboard, sheet metal, old packing cases … Scanty light, a trickle of water from a fountain … Gültepe, Fikirtepe, Kuştepe, all the hills ringing Istanbul, crowded with ramshackle hovels, rape and abuse, jealousy, bloodshed … Corrupt, the proud domes and minarets, the tall apartment buildings, insolent, sickening, extravagant, chaotic … All that is beautif
ul and good and human destroyed long ago … The few remaining trees chopped down. Corrupt, perishing in a noisome stench of decay, a swiftly disintegrating aged city, Istanbul. Its heart crawling with millions and millions of maggots, the water, the earth, the people rotting away, the very stones and steel putrefying, a garbage heap, a body ripe for devastating plagues and pestilences …

  Zeynel stretched himself leisurely, picked up his nylon bags and without a glance at Dursun Kemal vaulted up on to the deck, then over into a scow alongside. A woman was kindling some wood in a tin can. He stopped and sniffed at the fumes of the burning wood, then passed on to the wharf. At the Valide Mosque he went up the steps and turned on one of the ablution taps. The water gushed out. Quickly, he set his bags aside on the stone pavement and carefully washed his face and hair and hands. As he straightened up he saw Dursun Kemal on his right, bending over another tap and washing with exactly the same movements as himself. He did not speak to him.

  Eminönü Square, the streets around the mosque and the Spice Bazaar were slowly filling up. Itinerant vendors with pale, drawn faces, wearing rubber shoes and clothes that floated on their bodies, youths with long hair in high platform-soled shoes, their buttocks rippling in tight blue jeans like American Negroes, men with bushy village-style moustaches in indeterminate attire, neither country nor city, women in colourful peasant frocks worn over long trousers … Meatball-sellers were pushing in their carts mounted on old bicycle wheels and swirling with the mouthwatering fumes of burnt fat. Börek-vendors in soiled aprons had already set up their glass cases. So had the lahmacun-szlleis, and the wooden chums of the ayran-vendors were swinging away busily.