The Sea-Crossed Fisherman

by Yashar Kemal

  He cornered Mahmut near the Municipal Beach. ‘I am going to kill that Halim Bey Veziroğlu,’ he stated jubilantly. ‘His crimes have passed all bounds.’

  Mahmut gave him one look and his eyes widened. ‘Selim,’ he pleaded, ‘don’t do it. Don’t have that man’s blood on your hands.’ Taking his arm, he led him along the asphalt road to Yeşilköy and tried to bring him to his senses. ‘They’ll hang you.’

  ‘So much the better; it’ll be a relief for me.’

  ‘Or, worse than death, you’ll rot away in prison till the end of your days.’

  ‘I don’t care. I’ll kill him and go to Uzunyayla … And from there to Russia, to the high Caucasus, my homeland.’

  ‘Veziroğlu’s men won’t let you take one step out of Istanbul, even if you manage to escape. They’ll kill you.’

  ‘Well, I’ll have killed Veziroğlu himself, no?’

  The more Mahmut talked, the stronger Selim’s intent to kill seemed to grow. At last, Mahmut gave up. ‘God damn you!’ he cried. ‘Go ahead then, and be damned.’ And without another look at Selim he turned and walked away swiftly back to Menekşe.

  Fisher Selim hailed a passing taxi and got off in front of the Greek Orthodox Church in Yeşilköy. Blind Mustafa had acquired a mansion hereabouts. Selim knew it well for he had often sold fish to its former owner, an Ottoman aristocrat. Blind Mustafa had bought the mansion from Nuri Pasha’s gambler son, Hüsam Bey.

  The mansion was set in the middle of a large garden with old plane trees, umbrella pines and cedars. An iron railing enclosed the garden, painted a crude green as was the wrought-iron gate. ‘So this is where you live now, eh, Blind Mustafa?’ Selim muttered. Here was another Halim Bey Veziroğlu. This one too had started off by smuggling arms and drugs, then gone on to buying and selling real estate, after which he had established factories and hotels. He owned partnerships in a great many businesses. His sons directed a factory each, while the youngest managed a notorious hotel, very convenient for the smuggling of whisky and cigarettes because it was on the seashore.

  Fisher Selim hesitated as his hand went to the bell. A large sign read ‘Beware of the Dog’. Then he laughed. Hey, Blind Mustafa, hey … He pressed the bell and a tall white-coated manservant with a large Aleppo boil scar on his cheek came running up the garden path.

  ‘What d’you want, agha?’ he enquired.

  ‘Is this Mustafa’s house?’ Selim asked, a little put out.

  ‘Mustafa Bey,’ the manservant quickly corrected him.

  ‘I’m Selim the fisherman. I want to see him.’

  ‘On what business?’

  Selim thought this over. ‘I’m an old friend of Mustafa Bey’s,’ he said at last. ‘Just say it’s Fisher Selim …’

  ‘Wait here,’ the tall manservant said. He went into the house and reappeared almost at once to open the gate.

  At the door Selim paused, wiping his feet on the mat. He took off his cap and held it respectfully as he caught sight of Mustafa descending the stairs in a gold brocade dressing-gown. His hair had turned quite white, his squint was more pronounced, the left eye quite sunk in its socket, his dark-complexioned face deeply furrowed and his lower lip, so like a horse’s, thicker and drooping now.

  He was staring in amazement at Selim who still stood in the doorway. ‘Fisher Selim!’ he cried and hurried up to embrace him. ‘Can it be? But come in, come in. Welcome, welcome … Woman, look who’s come to our mansion. Look, look!’

  ‘Who?’ his wife called as she came down the stairs. ‘Oh oh oh, but it’s Fisher Selim!’ She held out her hand. ‘Welcome, Selim Bey, a hundred times welcome! We have never forgotten, Mustafa Bey and I, our good neighbour from Menekşe. We talk about you every day … Yes indeed.’ While her husband took Fisher Selim’s arm and led him up the stairs, she bustled off, saying, ‘Let me make coffee for our good Fisher Selim like in the old days, with my own hands, yes, with my own hands …’ She had grown very stout and lost all her former beauty, but she was as good-natured as ever.

  The room Mustafa took him to was very large, and a blue-flowered silk carpet spread from wall to wall. The green velvet armchairs, emblazoned with real gold, were stuffed with down so soft that one sank into them up to the waist. Dotted around, on consoles and gilt tables large and small, sparkled a whole array of cut-crystal objects, ashtrays, sugar bowls, candlesticks and many others. In a display cabinet of rosewood embossed with large roses were gold sheaths for cups and glasses, filigreed like the finest lace by a master goldsmith. From the ceiling of this enormous room hung a chandelier with hundreds of sparkling crystal pendants.

  ‘Sit down,’ Mustafa Bey urged Selim, indicating the most imposing armchair in the room. ‘That is my very own special armchair. The down was brought over from Japan, the framework is of Indian rosewood and the velvet comes from far-off China. Sit down, my dear Fisher Selim, make yourself comfortable.’

  Fisher Selim was not comfortable at all. With his cap in one hand and both hands on his knees he perched stiffly on the edge of the armchair. It’s only Blind Mustafa after all, he tried to remind himself, Blind Mustafa the smuggler, what if he does own this palace now? But the more he told himself this, the stiffer he became, his knees pressed tight together, his lips frozen in a bitter smile.

  ‘Now, now!’ Mustafa remonstrated genially. ‘Don’t sit like that. Make yourself comfortable. This is your house, the house of your old friend, Blind Mustafa, the arms-smuggler, miserable Blind Mustafa …’ He smiled, a broad smile from ear to ear, and rising he pushed Fisher Selim deep into the armchair.

  He sat down again and began talking about himself, how he had bought this mansion dirt-cheap, only a few millions, from that gambler son of Nuri Pasha, how he had come to Istanbul from his native country with five bullets in his body, acquired on a smuggling expedition across the frontier …

  ‘D’you remember, dear Fisher Selim, how you helped us when we were building that shanty of ours? You gave us water and food too, you brought us your choicest fish. If it hadn’t been for you we’d have starved that winter. Like now, you didn’t talk much then. D’you remember when the police arrived to pull down our shanty and you gave them one look and they packed off without another word? You remember my eldest son, the one who was born in our native country, the handsomest? It was only with the children you talked and laughed. He’s a very important man now, the biggest industrialist in Istanbul. When he comes here he always asks after you, after his Uncle Selim who gave not a damn for the whole world. If I could only see him again, he says, and kiss his hand, but I’m grown now, would he talk to me? Remember, Fisher Selim, remember? And at the time of the dolphin slaughter, d’you remember, my friend, how I gave you a brand-new German rifle without asking any money in return? Remember?’

  Sunk deep in the armchair, very small, very distant, as though beyond the seas, Selim only smiled. Mustafa’s wife appeared with the coffee, steaming, aromatic, in three large gold-sheathed cups on a silver tray.

  ‘Welcome, Selim Bey, dear friend. How good of you to have remembered us,’ she said as she held out the tray.

  Fisher Selim suddenly felt more at ease. He raised the cup to his lips and took a small sip. She gave her husband his coffee, then set the tray on a table, took her own cup, buried herself in an armchair, crossed her legs, and began to speak with the same eagerness as her husband and in almost the same words.

  Husband and wife talked on for a long time about themselves, about the high society they lived in, of how they were sick and tired of these worthless, incompetent idiots who knew nothing of real life, of the people who came to their house, poets, so addicted to drink, film stars, millionaires of whom it was impossible to understand how they had amassed such fortunes since they could hardly do up their own trousers, of television programmes and horse races and a whole lot of other things about which Fisher Selim was completely ignorant. It never seemed to occur to them that Selim might have come for some special reason. Once or twice he stirred in his armchair, but
Mustafa Bey immediately protested.

  ‘Please, dear friend! You’ve only just arrived …’

  ‘You’ve only just come, dear Selim Bey,’ his wife chimed in with a coquettish expression. ‘It’s not as if we were strangers. And, you know, it’s so dreary, this huge mansion, we get bored to death. We long for our old shanty in Menekşe, Mustafa and I. The children are all busy industrialists, with no time for us, the dears. Mustafa always says, “If only it was the old days, in our small house …” Sit down, stay a little longer …’

  She rose, collected the cups and, swinging her hips like a young girl, hurried off to the kitchen to make some more coffee.

  Mustafa Bey had grown very fat and his mouth was twisted to one side.

  ‘Our relatives from our home town don’t come to visit us any more either. I never did anything but good to them, helped them with their needs when they were here, even telephoned the doctors for them. But they drifted away from us all the same. Why, back in our Menekşe shanty we were overwhelmed with visitors …’ Bitterly he picked apart his relatives and then went on to do the same with his neighbours and acquaintances. ‘It’s a changed world, Fisher Selim, my dear old friend. There’s no expecting the right hand even to help the left. Yesterday’s friend is a stranger today. Why, I hardly know my sons, my daughter, my grandchildren, my own flesh and blood. With every passing day people and things are growing further and further away from me, strange … I feel cut off, bewildered. Those days long ago when I used to smuggle opium over the Syrian border under a hail of bullets, braving minefields, the days of my youth, penniless, miserable, Menekşe, how good they seem to me now! My sons … Strangers, different, high society, they are. They hate me, every one of them. Don’t let her hear this, but they’d soon do away with me if they got the chance …’

  To think how much blood he had shed, how many homes he had destroyed, to raise his sons to this status … He did not say so openly, but it was implied in all his words.

  He sighed. ‘So here you see me, Fisher Selim, alone, like the hoopoe bird, like a stone at the bottom of a well. Death would be better than this, idle, rootless, estranged … What price all the riches in the world …? Ah, death …’

  His wife came with fresh cups of coffee. ‘Again?’ she cried when she saw her husband’s miserable face. ‘The minute you get hold of somebody you go on and on with your old grievances. Why, even a bird teaches its young to fly and never sees them again. Even a bird …’

  ‘But I’m not a bird!’ Mustafa Bey moaned. ‘A human being’s different.’ He was almost in tears. Quickly, he took his coffee and sipped it noisily, while to cheer him up his wife began to praise their sons, to extol their successes, their cars and yachts, all worth millions, but in the end she too reverted to the subject of their loneliness, and two tears ran down her cheeks.

  ‘Sometimes we’ve a mind to leave Istanbul, this house, the children, and return to our village for good.’

  ‘Even if it is too hot there,’ Mustafa said.

  ‘The heat never killed a man,’ she said.

  ‘Certainly not,’ Mustafa said. ‘I’ve got an old grandmother back there who’s over a hundred and cutting her milk teeth! She’s stronger than all my sons.’

  Fisher Selim had finished his coffee and was preparing to leave when Mustafa Bey asked shyly, as if it had just occurred to him, ‘Is there something you wanted of me, my friend?’

  Flustered, Fisher Selim took a few steps towards the stairs without answering. Mustafa Bey clutched his arm.

  ‘I won’t let you go until you tell me what it is,’ he said. ‘You’re the only friend I have left in this world. D’you think that, whatever happens, I would ever forget all you did for us? Come on, tell me.’ His eyes were fixed on Selim with something of their old keen gaze, even the sunken left one bright now.

  Fisher Selim squirmed, then suddenly blurted out: ‘A gun … A gun …’ His mouth went dry.

  Mustafa Bey roared with laughter. ‘I left off doing that kind of business years ago,’ he said. ‘I wish I hadn’t. I wish I’d got killed in one of these encounters with the gendarmes, doing what I’ve always done, and not lived on to be a sport for dogs, despised even by my own children … No, I don’t do that any more, but I’ll give you my very own Nagant revolver. It came with me from the old country and I’ve always looked after it as the apple of my eye. Not a week’s gone by without my oiling it. Wife, bring me my revolver.’

  She had trotted off even before he had finished speaking and was soon back with the revolver in a brand-new leather case and some cartridge belts.

  Mustafa Bey strapped it quickly to Selim’s waist. ‘Good! How glad I am that you should have it!’ He exclaimed and taking Selim’s arm he went down the stairs with him, breathing in with relish the smell of fish that emanated from his guest.

  Fisher Selim left the mansion, his ears humming, his head swimming, strangely saddened. He hardly knew how he got home. Without eating or drinking he threw himself on to his bed and fell asleep.

  He rose at dawn and went down to the wharf. Till sunrise he cleaned his boat and the engine and repaired his nets. He felt as light as a bird. Every now and again he took a fond look at the revolver attached at his waist. As he got up a small wave rocked the boat. Selim was well used to keeping his balance on choppy seas. He jumped on to the wooden pier with the agility of a young man and made his way to the railway station. He did not have long to wait for the train.

  At the door of Halim Bey Veziroğlu’s office were three heavyweight bodyguards carrying guns. Fisher Selim was a familiar face to them and they showed him in at once.

  Halim Bey Veziroğlu was bent over his desk, working. He lifted his head very slowly and came face to face with Selim. His eyes widened in a horrified stare and his face turned ashen. Resting his hands on the table, he pushed himself back in his chair. ‘Welcome, Fisher Selim,’ he stammered, trying fruitlessly to smile. ‘Sit down, my friend. Please don’t stay standing there.’ His eyes flashed in sudden fury, but only for an instant. He looked to right and left, then at Selim again, his eyes shifting fearfully. Then somehow he took a hold on himself. ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘You’ve put together the necessary sum, haven’t you? But even if you haven’t, the land’s yours for whatever you can give me. Forgive me, my friend, if I’ve given you a little trouble. That land is yours. You planted seven olive trees on it. Have you got the money with you?’

  ‘No …’

  ‘Well, you can bring it tomorrow, whatever you’ve got, and I’ll give you the title deeds. I’ve thought it over. As you know, land prices are going up with every passing day. At this rate you’ll never be able to buy that land. As for me, I’ve got such a lot of land … This bit, I said to myself, shall go to Selim Bey. I hope you will be happy on it. May it bring you luck. May you live in peace and comfort in the house you build there, my good Fisher Selim Bey …’

  Slumped in the armchair, his face purple, his eyes blinking in amazement, Fisher Selim could not speak. Beads of sweat stood out on his brow and his only thought was how to escape from the room. After a while he staggered to his feet. ‘Thank you, Bey,’ he blurted out, his voice choking. ‘How shall I ever be able to repay this?’

  Did they shake hands, did he say anything else? He never knew. Swaying, he lurched out of the room.

  It was to Mahmut he went, straight afterwards.

  ‘Have you killed him?’ Mahmut asked, alarmed at Selim’s flustered expression.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then what happened?’

  ‘Nothing. He’s given me the land. Veziroğlu …’

  ‘Well! Aren’t you pleased?’

  ‘But I don’t want that land any longer. What business have I got in Çengelköy? I can’t leave this place, it’s my home. This is the sea I’m used to. I’m going to buy that plot of Zeki Bey’s. The plane trees are taller there and I’ve got the whole of the Marmara Sea at my feet. But what am I to say to that Veziroğlu now?’

  Mahmut laughed. �
��Did you give him the money?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then you won’t go back there and that’s the end of it.’

  ‘Won’t he expect me?’

  ‘Of course not. He’ll be only too glad …’

  19