by Yashar Kemal
Tiny Hasan welcomed him with delight, feasting him on raki, the very best fish and special Black Sea dishes, hardly knowing how to show his pleasure, but Selim’s gloomy expression never relaxed. Every morning, he pounced on the newspapers, and as he read them the wild look in his eyes slowly faded and after a while, feeling a little calmer, he went out to the square under the plane trees and walked up and down, deep in thought.
On the evening of the fourth day, an uncontrollable panic took hold of him. He rushed to his boat without even taking leave of Skipper Hasan, and started off full speed for Menekşe.
As he went under the station bridge and up the slope he thought his heart would stop beating. Dawn was about to break, the sea just paling, shedding its reflection over the land. Then he saw Zeynel’s shadow on the doorstep, gathered in a ball just as he had left him. An infinite joy spread through his body, a tingling radiance.
‘Zeynel!’ His voice was tender, full of love. ‘It’s me, your Uncle Selim.’ With trembling hands, he inserted the key into the lock and opened the door. ‘Come in,’ he said. ‘We’re going to Vasili, to Limnos Island, to Greece …’
21
Dursun Kemal woke up with a start and leapt to his feet. Still half-asleep, rubbing his eyes, he made for the edge of the wharf and peed lengthily into the water. He was doing up his fly when his fingers suddenly tangled with the buttons. ‘Zeynel Abi,’ he cried, ‘Zeynel Abi!’ Quickly he darted through the stacks of apples, oranges, tangerines, cauliflowers, cabbages, leeks and radishes, knocking into empty crates and people. ‘Zeynel Abi, where are you? Where have you gone?’ Shouting madly, he rushed round the market several times, then stopped, his arms falling helplessly to his sides, his mind quite blank. Swarthy hamals with long black moustaches, bent double under tall piles of crates, the veins in their neck swollen, their eyes bulging, kept shoving him aside. ‘Make way, make way!’ Dursun Kemal gazed searchingly at everyone who went by. Finally he approached a tall man with a long wrinkled neck, crumpled trousers and a drooping black coat, and stared at him intently. The man gave a start, then smiled.
‘D’you want something, my child?’
‘Have you seen my Zeynel Abi? My brother Zeynel …He was here only a minute ago. With three bags …’
Surprised, but still smiling, the man bent over Dursun Kemal, his neck stretching longer than ever. ‘I don’t know such a person,’ he said.
Dursun Kemal left him at once and intercepted another man. ‘Zeynel Abi … he passed this way? He was holding three large bags …’
‘Never heard of him …’
He questioned a shopkeeper, a woman, a municipal officer, a beautiful girl, some hamals. ‘Zeynel Abi, my brother … While I was asleep … Three bags … Huge, full to the brim … Has he gone this way?’
The crowd in the market was growing denser. Undeterred, Dursun Kemal kept buttonholing every pleasant-faced person he encountered. By noon, it was becoming clear to him that no one had seen Zeynel. He stopped, irresolute. The high-roofed building, larger than any hangar, boomed and reverberated from the noise of the crowd, of people bargaining, arguing, swearing, complaining, laughing, buying and selling, hurrying to and fro.
Suddenly, he spotted a gaunt, hollow-cheeked man with a greying unshaven beard, a drooping white moustache stained with tobacco, and wearing a torn coat and trousers like stovepipes. His three-cornered eyes were sad, tiny, the whites invisible. Squatting against a stack of empty crates, he was gazing absently at the Golden Horn and drawing on a half-smoked cigarette with deep puffs that made his sunken cheeks still hollower.
Dursun Kemal went to him at once.
‘You,’ he addressed the man, ‘do you know my brother Zeynel? Last night we slept here, the two of us. He would never leave me. What can have happened to him, where can he have gone to? I’ve been looking for him all morning. He had three bags with him, large as sacks, all chock-full … Have you seen him? Could the police have come in the night and I didn’t hear them? Did they shoot him, kill him? I looked and looked, but there was no trace of blood anywhere. You work as a hamal here, tell me did they catch him in the night, did they handcuff him, was Hüseyin Huri with the police? Did you see anything?’
The man took another drag on his cigarette and looked up. ‘Who is this Zeynel?’ he asked curiously.
Dursun Kemal was thrown into confusion. ‘My brother Zeynel? Why … He’s a fisherman … There isn’t another one like him for catching fish on this bridge nor on the other one. Only a few days ago … On that other bridge, the Galata Bridge, he caught thirty bonitos in just three hours.’
‘Well, that’s something!’ the hamal marvelled. ‘He must be a really good fisherman, that Zeynel of yours.’
‘The best!’ Dursun Kemal cried fervently. ‘You know him, you’ve seen him, haven’t you?’
‘Well, no, I haven’t.’
‘But last night … Right there, see? We slept, the two of us, between those empty crates, on the linoleum … He’ll come soon, won’t he?’
‘He will,’ the hamal said with conviction.
‘Of course he will!’ Dursun Kemal cried joyfully. He rose and went on with his search until a sharp-faced, thin-moustached lottery-man, who was drawing lots for black-market cigarettes, waylaid him. The lottery-man pushed him into a corner and slapped his face.
‘You’re going to work for me.’
‘I’m busy, Abi.’
‘What business can you have, you whelp?’ The lottery-man seized his ear. ‘Want me to tear your ear off? You’ll keep watch here at this door and warn me when the police come. I’ll give you fifteen lira.’
‘I’ve got something to do, Abi.’
‘What’ve you got to do, you little bastard?’
‘I’m looking for my Zeynel Abi …’
‘Fuck your mother and your Zeynel Abi’s too …’
The lottery-man was lifting his hand to hit him again, but Dursun Kemal ducked and shot away. ‘Just you wait and see what you’ll get when my Zeynel Abi comes! He’ll pump you full of lead, he will. D’you know who he is, my Zeynel Abi, you blockhead? He’s the gangster Zeynel Çelik!’
The lottery-man stopped short, a little shaken, while Dursun Kemal made himself scarce between the bright-coloured trucks that crowded the pavements and the street outside. He regretted having mentioned Zeynel, but, my God, how frightened the lottery-man had been!
Wending his way to the Spice Bazaar, Dursun Kemal had recovered some of his old confidence. No one could kill the gangster Zeynel Çelik. Wasn’t he cunning as a fox, didn’t the newspapers say just that about him? How he slipped fish-like through the tightest police net in the twinkling of an eye, how he vaulted from roof to roof, from wall to wall, so fast that the best marksmen could not hit him? No, no one would ever catch him!
With the firm conviction that he would come upon Zeynel at any moment, Dursun Kemal straggled through the crowds of shoppers, looking eagerly at people’s faces, and emerged into the Flower Market. He was just stroking the nose of a rabbit in a cage when he became conscious of the bulge in his trouser pocket. He thrust his hand in and felt the wads of banknotes. At once he made his way through the covered market to the old han where the cloth-printer had his workshop. He knew of an empty room there. Stealthily, he opened the door and slipped in. He drew a stool under the light that came from a little window, then fearfully turned back and bolted the door. Now he was safe. He began to count the banknotes. What a lot of money it was! What could he not buy with all this money …? And there was also the money Zeynel had given him before. He rolled up the banknotes, fixed them securely under his shirt and went out.
He longed for his old master, the warm voice, the gentle eyes, the shimmering white beard, the beautiful clever hands … Had he read in the papers about his mother’s murder? If only he could talk to him, tell him how it had all taken place in front of his eyes … How, as his father was thrusting that dagger into his mother, he had closed his eyes and screamed, how his father had then lunged at h
im and would have killed him too, had he not fled, how his father had pursued him right up to Yildiz Park … Then, when he had come back home, he had found the house full of police, his mother lying lifeless in her own blood … ‘Did you bring Zeynel to this house?’ the police chief had asked him. He had been so afraid that he admitted it and the neighbours had borne witness. ‘It’s that ill-fated boy introduced the gangster into this house. He’s the cause of his beautiful mother’s death.’ They had all said the same thing, every one, and had even seen Zeynel stabbing his mother … Dursun Kemal had tried to intervene. ‘Mr Police Chief,’ he had said, ‘Zeynel didn’t kill my mother. It was my father. I saw it with my own eyes. He was going to kill me too, but I escaped and hid in Yildiz Park. Zeynel didn’t kill her. Why should he?’ At this, the police chief had boxed his ears, and so hard that he’d been knocked down, his nose bleeding. And the neighbours had fallen upon him too, crying ‘Liar, wretch, murderer!’ They would have killed him if the police had not wrested him from their hands. As he fled, he could still hear them, ‘Dirty vicious wretch, his mother’s pimp …’
What if he went to the Security Department now and told them the truth? Who would believe him? No one, and he would be soundly beaten up for his pains. It was strange, but the police, the neighbours, everyone wanted to believe Zeynel was the murderer.
As he was brooding over all this, his feet had taken him back to the place where they had slept the night before. The newspapers, the old linoleum on which they had lain were still there. Suddenly, the roar of the huge closed market made his head whirl. He flung himself outside. On the wharf he caught sight of the policemen who had been there the other day, one of them scratching his bottom as always, the other spitting into the sea and their companions arguing and waving their arms. Dursun Kemal hesitated, then bravely walked up to them.
‘Police Uncles,’ he said in a trembling voice, ‘have you seen my brother Zeynel? The fisherman Zeynel …’ And then very quickly: ‘It wasn’t Zeynel killed my mother, it was my father.’ Before the policemen had time to gather their wits, he took to his heels and disappeared among the crowd on Galata Bridge.
For a while he wandered in and out of boats, still searching, then made for the Sirkeci train terminal. There he caught sight of Hüseyin Huri deep in a game of craps with some other boys. Swiftly he turned away and rambled on, still with that feeling of being on the point of finding something he had lost. A bicycle caught his eye in a shop window. It was just like the one Oktay, the son of the bank manager at Beşiktaş, owned. How he flew on that bicycle! Oktay said he would soon win the Balkan bicycle championship. The girls were all crazy about Oktay, and about his sweat suit too … He went into the shop and caressed the bicycle.
‘How much is this?’ he asked.
The sales assistant look at him suspiciously. ‘It’s very expensive,’ he said. ‘It’s not for you.’
‘I’ve got a lot of money,’ Dursun Kemal said, caught off his guard.
‘Who gave it to you?’ the clerk said, assuming a benign air.
Dursun Kemal saw that he was lost if he hesitated. ‘Who do you think?’ he laughed. ‘My father, of course. My father’s a sailor.’
The man still looked doubtful, but he mentioned a price.
‘Good,’ said Dursun Kemal. He inspected the bicycle in minute detail. ‘Very good. Now I’ll go home and get the money. Can’t you make it a little cheaper?’
‘We’ll do something,’ the assistant said, laughing up his sleeve.
On leaving the shop, Dursun Kemal felt a great emptiness inside. What was he to do, where was he to find Zeynel? He wandered up and down the bridge and went back to the Vegetable Market and to the place where they had slept. There was no trace of Zeynel. Where could he have gone to? He would never have left him of his own accord, this Dursun Kemal knew, but he had been so strange the last days, dazed, hardly knowing where he was going … Maybe he had got up in the night just to pee and then walked off, forgetting Dursun Kemal for a while. Maybe he was even now looking high and low for him, gazing eagerly into people’s faces, or perhaps in fear, his eyes rolling like a chaffinch’s …
He saw a barrow of bananas for sale and suddenly felt a gnawing hunger.
‘One kilo,’ he said to the man and, having paid for it, he went to sit on an old sailing boat moored alongside. Swinging his legs over the edge of the boat, he peeled his bananas and slowly ate them all up. He was scared now. His heart ached. He did not want to think of his father, nor of his mother, nor even of Zeynel … But what if Zeynel were to pop his head out of the hold this minute? He sprang up eagerly and lifted the hatch of the hold with eager hands. It was dark inside and smelled of tar, pine and rotting seaweed.
‘Zeynel Abi, Zeynel Abi, it’s me, Dursun Kemal. Are you there?’
Several times he called out into the darkness of the hold, but there was no sign of life. Despondently, he got to his feet and drifted back to the Spice Bazaar. At the back of the market he came upon a shop window full of marbles of every size and colour. In the middle, the marbles were heaped in a great pile, flashing brilliantly in the sunlight, shedding a wavering rainbow radiance on the wall opposite and tinging even the faces of passers-by with a riot of colour.
‘I want a hundred and fifty marbles,’ Dursun Kemal said to the shopkeeper with a regal air. ‘These ones. And these … Ten of those …’ He pointed out the colours and sizes and the man counted the glass marbles into a nylon bag. Dursun Kemal handed over the money and stepped out into the Spice Bazaar again, a carefree whistle on his lips. Here he bought some pastirma and also a couple of simits from a stand at the entrance. Then he went to sit on the steps of the Valide Mosque. As he ate, he crumbled up pieces of simit and threw them to the pigeons.
Here he was, getting everything he had always wanted. He had wished for a bicycle like Oktay’s and now he was going to buy it. Pastirma and simit were among the things he loved most and now he was eating them to his heart’s content, sharing them with the pigeons too. And look at those marbles, gleaming with a hundred different colours, clinking gaily in the nylon bag! A pain like poison came to settle in his heart. He saw his mother, her mangled body, heard her screams, her pleading with his father as he stabbed her again and again. The food stuck in his throat. And Zeynel Abi too, how could he have gone and abandoned him like this? Leaving the rest of his food on the steps, he rose, turning helplessly this way and that, wanting to scream, to throw himself to the ground and weep. He ground his teeth, seething, tense to breaking. A tall, dark, leathery lottery-man was passing in front of him, kicking at the pigeons on the pavement. In a flash, Dursun Kemal was at his throat. The man, big and strong as he was, struggled desperately, unable to free himself. His eyes were starting from his head, his arms flapping feebly by the time some men came to his rescue.
‘But I didn’t do anything to him,’ the man was saying dazedly, as he retrieved his scattered packets of American cigarettes. ‘I didn’t even look at him …’
Four men had grabbed hold of Dursun Kemal and were carrying him away, his legs kicking wildly in the air. At last, tired out, panting like a bellows, he sank down on the steps of the mosque. Some of his marbles had fallen out of the bag. He was just about to start picking them up when the young simit-seller he had bought his simits from came up to help him.
‘Here you are, brother,’ the simit-seller said, holding out the marbles in his apron. ‘My, but you are a brave one! Why, you were going to finish him off, that huge man, if they hadn’t come between you!’ Together, they put the marbles back into the nylon bag, the simit-seller still looking admiringly at Dursun Kemal. ‘Fancy! That huge man! And how he bolted without another word as soon as he’d got his cigarettes …’
Dursun Kemal smiled gratefully. ‘He was kicking the pigeons, did you see?’
‘I saw him, the beast …’
‘And I was feeding them with some of my simit …’
‘Yes, I saw that too.’ The simit-seller patted Dursun Kemal’s dishevelled
head.
Emboldened, Dursun Kemal signalled to him to bend down and whispered in his ear: ‘Tell me, have you seen my Zeynel Abi around here by any chance?’
The simit-seller straightened up. ‘Who is this Zeynel?’ he asked.
Dursun Kemal pulled him down again and stuck his mouth to his ear. ‘He’s the gangster Zeynel Çelik. But he didn’t kill my mother. It was my father did it. I’m in Zeynel Çelik’s gang …’
‘That can’t be true.’
‘But it is! I’ve got two guns …’
The simit-seller burst out laughing. He patted Dursun Kemal’s head again and, still grinning, went back to his round tray and started hawking his simits. ‘Simits! Fresh and crisp! Warm from our famous Hasanpaşa Bakery …’
Dursun Kemal stamped his foot. ‘Fool,’ he muttered. ‘Just wait till you see my guns. And police guns too!’
He ran up the steps of the Eminönü overpass and came to the bridge, which was as usual a tangle of cars and people. Cleaving through the crowd, he descended to the waterside under the bridge and stopped in front of the man who sold fishing tackle.
Many people, young and old, were leaning over the parapet, their fishing lines dangling in the water and the fish they had caught swimming in coloured plastic basins beside them. All around them, groups of admiring children clustered with cries of delight at every catch. From two rowing-boats alongside came the strong smell of fried fish and the shouts of the men selling it. At the end of the bridge, fishmongers had displayed their fish in wide basins and were putting them, live and jumping, into nylon bags for their customers.
Dursun Kemal selected a fishhook from the seller and a long blue nylon line wound round a largish float. He promptly fixed the hook to the swivel and attached the swivel to the line with expert hands. Then he bought a can of bait and, having baited his hook, cast his line. In a moment a fish struck and he quickly drew it in, struggling at the end of the line. It was quite a large fish. As he was unhooking it he came face to face with a small boy who was watching him with awe.