A Useless Man

A Useless Man

I’ve been feeling odd lately. I prefer to keep myself to myself, and I don’t want anyone knocking on my door, not even mailmen, the nicest men in the world. But I’m happy enough with my neighborhood. What if I told you I hadn’t left it in seven years? Or that none of my friends know where I am? For seven years now, I haven’t strayed beyond these four streets, except to walk down to Karaköy at the end of each quarter, to collect the rent from our store.

There are three parallel streets, and one that cuts across, and then there is my street, cut off from all the others and so short and narrow you might not even consider it a street. I have named the other streets One, Two, Three, and Four, in order of importance. But my street doesn’t have a number. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.

A milkman lives on the ground floor of my building, and there are two carpenters across the street. I’d never been to a carpenter before. I’d always wondered how they got by. The ones on my street never stop working. They remind me of the gulf between me and other people: in forty years I haven’t once needed a carpenter, that’s just the way it is. It always surprises me when an Istanbullu actually goes to a carpenter. But who knows how many carpenters are doing business in this city of ours?

Once out of bed, I head straight for the café. It’s a clean and tidy place with seven or eight tables, with customers who come and go without so much as a word, unless they retire to the corner to play King or Bezique or chess. The owner is a French-Jewish lady. The nicest woman in the world.

“Bonjour Madame,” I say the moment I step inside.

“Bonjour Monsieur. Comment allez-vous?” she says.

I give all the right answers. But she knows better. She gives me what I think are honeyed words in French. I only understand a few. When I need to, I throw in the odd oui, and then a few nons to balance out the ouis. We get on really well. She tucks a French magazine under my arm and I sit down to look at the pictures. I jot down a few new words to look up in the dictionary when I get home, and when I read the magazine the next morning I say, Goodness, who would have thought it?

The madame: “Un cappuccino?”

Me: “Of course.”

Then I throw down a c’est ça to keep it going in French. The lady is really pleased. She starts explaining how to make a cappuccino, in German.

And I listen.

Toward eleven I climb up the little street to the tramway line, turn left, and in just five steps I’m in front of a bookstore where I buy a few more illustrated French magazines. Stepping out with the magazines under my arm, I hurry back to my street. Ah! Such relief once I’m there. The people here are different, nothing like the ones near the tramway line. They scare me.

These days I’m hardly ever hungry, but there’s a man who makes tripe soup in our neighborhood. He’s an honest man and he makes good soup, and his place isn’t anything like those filthy tripe soup restaurants in other parts of the city. His soup’s as white as snow and he serves it in antique bowls.

“You like it seasoned, Mansur Bey?”

“Yes Bayram, I would,” I say.

Maybe he’s called Bayram or maybe Muharrem, but for me every man who sells tripe soup is called Bayram.

“Should I throw in a little vinegar and garlic, Mansur Bey?”

“Not today. It upset my stomach the other day, gave me gas. Have your waiter go fetch a lemon. Give it a quick squeeze of lemon instead.”

“But we’ve saved the other half of the lemon we got for you the other day.”

“Really?”

I was as happy as a child to hear about that half lemon. And Bayram was like a child, happy that I was happy and happy that he’d set the half lemon aside for me.

“Should I squeeze out the full half lemon, Mansur Bey?”

“Squeeze it dry, Bayram! Let’s have it extra sour.”

After finishing my extra sour soup, I go back up to my little apartment. With my French dictionary beside me, I fall asleep before I have even started translating the captions in the French magazine I bought earlier that day. I wake up at exactly four-thirty. Then I go out for a stroll. I leave my building, turn right, cross Street Number One and hurry along the sidewalk left of the tramway line before I dive into Street Number Two, which is parallel to Street Number One.

It’s a narrow, seedy street. Caked with mud. There’s a bar on the right, then a real estate agent, then a restaurant. I always get the feeling they serve forbidden fruit with their food. The same sad women go there every night with the same strange men; they could be eating frogs, or mice, or crows, or cats, or dogs, or even humans. I’m at the head of my street now. I’m just passing by. I turn to my right to say hello to the woman who sells dried fruit on the street. “Hello, sir,” she says. She has the most exquisite eyes. I hesitate before I turn right … Why?

I’ll explain. Now this happened on one of my evening strolls. When most people go out for a stroll, they will pause now and again, if not to look into someone’s eyes or a shop window, then just to take in their surroundings. Such things are beyond me. As I approach the street in question I begin to walk faster, eyes glued to the ground — all this to give the impression that it angers me to have to walk through it all. Why? Well let me explain.

The truth, sir, is that a true devil of a little Jewish girl lives in a house on that street, with a face that older ladies would describe as all in place (though she does have a spot in one eye, but what’s the harm in that?) and gargantuan breasts that undulate in dark olive waves beneath her low-cut dress and hands plump enough to set a hazelnut on top. She sits at a window with winged shutters, absently sewing. But sometimes she lingers at the front door for hours, looking up and down the street, striking up conversations with every man who wanders by. Her full and strong legs keep her firmly on the ground, but olive-skinned Jews are the most beautiful of them all, and, oh, if only I could kiss those legs, just once.

Now, one day when I found myself ambling down that infamous street, the Jewish girl was at her door and the carpenter was standing at his door, which was just opposite. As I made to pass between them, the carpenter stepped out into the street, planting himself square in front of me.

“I’ve had enough from you — do you hear? You come by here one more time, I’ll sock you in the eye.”

From that day on I was tormented by the desire to walk down that street again. Oh the palpitations I suffered struggling to stifle that desire on my next few evening strolls. I knew the carpenter’s threats weren’t empty — he would come straight out and punch me in the eye! Oh what difficult days those were. For years I forced my heart to shut down from the moment I sensed the first flutter. For days my heart wouldn’t allow so much as an extra beat. I’d check it: always sixty-three, always sixty-three, though sometimes it might drop to sixty-two. “It should settle into its normal rhythm when you’re walking,” a doctor friend of mine told me. But I couldn’t just stop in the middle of the street and take my pulse! But I could sit down and relax and order a coffee and, throwing a glance left and right to see if anyone happened to be looking, I could discreetly pull out my watch to check: sixty-three. Even if a woman looked me in the eye, even if the price of oranges jumped from five kuruş to twenty-five, I refused to be moved. If they were selling for five, I’d eat them; if the price had gone up to twenty-five then it was goodbye to oranges. So back in the days when Street Number Three was a no-go area, like the rest of Istanbul, my evening strolls weren’t so pleasant. I was trapped inside two streets. But I was never bored. In fact it was a quiet neighborhood, quiet but also vibrant. How could a Levantine-Jewish neighborhood not be vibrant? The Jews especially. What wonderful, warm, vibrant people. The neighborhood Jews weren’t from the rich cut of society, and I’d no business with the rich anyway. When the local orange seller — that’s Saloman — got more than forty kuruş out of me, he was the loveliest man in the world. When his oranges were too expensive and I didn’t buy them, he didn’t throw me dirty looks when I walked away or grumble when I offered him an impossible price. But just the opposite — he knew that I had every right.

It’s evening. I know it is when the lady shuts the wooden blinds over her patisserie windows. There’s a soft yellow light inside. She’s switched on the electricity. Salomon puts a candle on his crate of oranges and the man who sells salted bonito plugs in a three hundred watt bulb. He slices red onions; they are the color of cyclamen and they shimmer as alluringly as lipstick or nail polish. Salted bonito! They conjure up the inner thighs of a voluptuous, olive-skinned Greek woman!

When ladies of the night want to be left alone, they step out of the meyhane with their misfortune and slip into my street to sidle up to me. Oh my miserable street!

There are two meyhane with live Turkish music on Street Number One. Taxis idle outside while drivers and prostitutes wander between the cars. Someone once told me that car antennae aren’t really lightning rods put there to take a sudden bolt, but I was still fooled when I first saw them, the bright metal rods flashing white like lightning in the rain.

That tiny little tail on the back of an enormous beast of an automobile; I love that menacing and maniacal twitching. In the rain I stop in front of my tripe soup restaurant, pull my hat down over my ears and watch with what I imagine must be baleful eyes the people passing, and I pretend I have just been dropped into this neighborhood from a distant land without women, and am now searching for the one with whom I can share my sorrows.

Ten minutes later a man much older than me walks past. He’s a burly fellow with a gray moustache, and though he has a full head of hair, it’s gone gray. A driver spots him and says:

“Hey there. What’s up?”

“Hello there, boys,” he says.

Then he rattles off a few lines of dusty verse. When he’s moved on, a driver says:

“He’s an educated man, but twisted. Has a weakness for the young ladies. The younger and more wretched the better … What a fool!”

The educated man heads for the nightclub across the street. A little later, I head in after him. He walks toward the musicians and sits down right in front. He’s a clean, well-dressed man, his hands, his hair, and his moustache are immaculate. He can’t be more than fifty. There are one, two, three, four, five women in his booth. The sugar daddy levels his eyes on the youngest. They have her order him a drink and they bring him a pomegranate cooler with four or five drops of rubbing alcohol. They bring him one more. The man calls out to a coy girl with sweet round eyes and whispers into her ear before he begins to drop off. He falls asleep, his elbow propped on the table, but every now and then when the violinist in dark glasses strikes up a solo in a screeching that blends perfectly with the band, cutting through the soft chatter of the women, he moans, “Allah, Allah.” The waiter Bekir told me how he rests his head on the chest of the girl he’ll eventually leave with and how until then he sleeps there and weeps and sings and recites verse. Never more than these five things (for example, he never laughs). Then he goes back to sleep. Now he’s deaf to the cries of the infamous brute from who knows which part of town, who flashes into the joint like lightning and screams at I don’t know whom; he’s still fast asleep when the meyhane proprietor — who hails from the Black Sea — moves in on two gangsters, throws them into the street and smashes the window front of a rival club. Some nights he even misses the young goliath who barges into the place with the rain and the snow, and (out of courtesy, perhaps, or just to make himself look important) sets up one of the chairs reserved for the tired, old singers to button up the trousers of a plump horn player, whose cheeks and neck and hair and moustache and coat collar are all soaked in sweat, who then proceeds to produce the most god awful screech on his thin little horn. The horn player is the last act with the band. He comes out around eleven, heaving his body about on two thick, short, fat legs. He takes off his velvet coat, tosses it in a corner of the room and salutes the blind violinist. The drummer whispers something to the blind violinist who cuts off the horn player’s salute. And the zither player’s taut, freshly shaved and alum-smeared face, hardly visible behind the singer, suddenly collapses into a million crinkles. The horn player sits down. Shouldn’t there be buttons on his pants? Or have they popped off because he’s so fat? The tassels on his green scarf dangle out of his fly. Some notice and laugh and the nightclub proprietor signals to him with a wink and a nod. Embarrassed, the horn player stands up, turns his back to the audience, takes a few moments to adjust his pants, sits back down, looks around the room, then pulls a cigarette case out of his pocket. It seems like he might roll a cigarette — but no, he pulls a reed out of one of his horns and puts it away. Then he takes out another one, surely the best one, or rather he pretends to be taking the best one out just for this night. That’s when I always leave.

I haven’t been anywhere else in Istanbul for seven years apart from this street. I’m afraid. I’m worried that I might get beaten up if I go further afield, or robbed, or lynched, and who knows what else — just the thought of leaving these streets fills me with confusion. Anywhere else, and I feel out of my depth. Everyone looks so frightening. I wonder who they all are, these people on the streets. The city is so huge, and everyone’s a stranger. Why do they even make these cities to pack in this many people, when people don’t like each other anymore? I just don’t understand. Is it so that people can deceive and humiliate and murder each other? How can it be that so many strangers would wish to live in the same space?

If nothing else, a neighborhood is still a neighborhood. My shop could burn down, and I could go hungry. But somehow I have confidence that the man who sells me tripe soup with lots of lemon every afternoon will serve me until I die. And Saloman will keep handing me a bruised orange or two when I pass by, and to the half-dressed Jewish children on the street. My clothes might be old and ragged by then, they might not let me in, but the lady will still serve me a coffee at the door.

These are pipedreams, I know, but they show you how much I love my neighborhood. I don’t want to see anyone else anymore, most particularly old acquaintances. Sometimes I run into one of them passing through my neighborhood.

“So finally! So this is where you’ve been hiding, is it?”

I lower my head and look down as if to say, what’s the problem with that?

“People always said you could have ended up anywhere …”

The former friend will add:

“But damn it, you’re still drifting, aren’t you?” It’s not about giving up the idle life, it’s about giving up altogether, but I can’t explain that to him. Some say:

“I know the deal, you rascal. You’re chasing someone …”

The truth is, I’ve even stopped chasing after myself. But I still love that dark Jewish girl, the carpenter’s friend, the one with the dark spot eyes, and the voluptuous hands. I can only dream of the other warm and sweet-scented corners beyond her legs.

Yesterday I decided for no reason to venture outside the neighborhood. I went to Unkapanı and then up to Saraçhane. Istanbul had changed so much since I’d last seen it. I was dumbstruck. But enjoying myself, nonetheless.

Clean asphalt, broad avenues … What a splendid aqueduct — from a mile away, it looked almost like the Arc de Triomphe from a whole mile away! The Gazanfera? Madrasah just beside it: so bright and white and charming. I visited one park after another, to take refuge under the trees. And as I wandered fearfully through the city, I saw people, people everywhere. I walked as far as Kıztaşı. I started down the hill from Fatih. Now I was in Saraçhane. I looked up and saw workmen on the top of a building they were demolishing. There used to be a hamam around here. That must be the building they were tearing down. I felt an overwhelming desire to go to a hamam.

Well, it seems there’s no harm in saying it, seeing that I’ve already embarrassed myself enough: I hadn’t washed in seven years. In all that time it never even crossed my mind. But now I was itching, a terrible itching all over! I thought I had fleas. So I went into the hamam and I washed, oh how I washed! I washed off all the years of caked filth. I felt much better when I was done. But the sweat, so much sweat! Everywhere I rubbed I was sure to peel off bits of skin, grease, grime, or whatever it was. I was shocked at how much grease and grime a human being could carry. My skin was positively caked with it.

I left the hamam and got on the tram, thinking that I’d go home and then back out to Teşvikiye and the surrounding districts. But once my head hit the pillow I fell asleep and slept for a full twenty-four hours. I woke up the next day at two and hurried out for a bowl of tripe soup.

“God praise, Mansur Bey, you look the picture of perfect health,” Bayram said.

I couldn’t tell him I’d been to a hamam. I asked for soup without garlic. Then I went for my stroll. I was in Maçka by nightfall. A different world entirely. Back home I promised myself I wouldn’t leave my neighborhood for another seven years, but it didn’t happen that way. Something was making my head spin, and for the next two days my life made no sense. Can you guess what I got to thinking? That I’d sell our store and my apartment. And you know that nightclub I was telling you about, the one with the live music? And that girl working outside taking orders, you know the one with the small forehead. Well, I’d take her as my lover. And a year after that I’d die.

I’d jump on a Bosphorus boat one day, taking my seat on one of those benches at the back, and somewhere near Arnavutköy or Bebek, I’d stand up, check to make sure no one was looking and, if I was alone, I’d climb over the railing and jump into the sea.