A Useless Man

Fire Tongs and a Chair on a Winter’s Night

It’s getting on my nerves, this empty room. And that clock on the wall, tick, tick, and tocking, while the chair just sits there. The snow is coming down faster than before. It turns me to ice just to look at it. I feel like I need to do something. But I know I can’t do a thing. I could jump on a ferry and head for the city. Take my chances. It’s always there waiting for me: that street lottery with its hopes and its perils, its noise and its twists of fate. I plunge my hand into the game bag and pull out my numbers: 77 red! 19, tombola!

Precisely nine miles between me and the city. Water surrounding me, on all four sides. The snow slows down, and then picks up again. A rooster starts crowing. A child chasing a turkey. I hear the tolling of a bell and in the distance a phaeton. Again, the rooster crows.

That empty chair needs filling. But who would ever sit here? There’s nobody I want to see. That chair, though … doesn’t it look like it’s expecting someone? The carpenter who made it, he had a head on his shoulders. He knew this chair was destined to sit here like this, waiting for people.

I peel an orange and eat it.

I must have dozed off, because the clock stopped ticking. But now it’s back at it. The snow is coming down slower again. The tongs on the wood-burning stove remind me of the chair. Someone should take them and pull out an ember, blow off the ash, and hold it out for me to light my cigarette.

I can just see that gypsy woman selling tongs along the shacks on the hills of Mecidiyeköy. Now she’s waving the very same tongs and shouting at her husband:

“Hey old man! These tongs are different! It’s like they’re calling out for fire just for the fun of it!”

“What the hell, Kehlibar. You lost your marbles? Come on, Kehlibar! Stop talking nonsense.”

“But I’m telling you, old man. These tongs are looking for my fire!”

Her husband has gray flecks in his moustache, more black than white. He looks around forty-five. His teasing eyes are shot with blood; they speak to me of fear.

As if to say, “Never you mind. The wife’s got a screw loose.”

But like me, the gypsy woman likes the way the tongs just sit there. And not only the way the tongs just sit there: the way they conjure up a helping hand, a dear friend, and an evening of good stories. She can see it all. Kehlibar is a lonely, troubled, and mysterious woman; she lives in her imagination. Her husband is jealous beyond belief. He sends her out with the other women, to sell tongs with the other women, and he’s on pins and needles until she gets home.

I light my cigarette. I face the window, to watch the heavy snowflakes falling. And suddenly I am shrouded by bliss. Where did it come from? I just don’t know. How did it arise from such a dark mood? It fits me as snugly as a shoe on a beautiful little lady’s soft foot. But what can I make of it?

I draw back the curtains. And I am a child again, thinking about my new rubber boots with their red lining, wondering if they’ll squeak in the snow on my way to school in the morning. Where to hang this happy moment? There beside two cloves of garlic and the evil eye? Later we tossed bird feed, millet, corn, and wheat under a cherry tree; we came out from the house with a sieve; we tied a pole to the edge of the sieve so we could lift it up; we tied a string to the pole; we threw the string down to a blue-eyed boy looking up from a lower window in the house, and he tied the end of the string to a stone and went back inside to munch on the hot orange peels drying on the wood-burning stove while he waited by the window for sparrows to fly into the trap …

Oh that miserable, foolish childhood of mine! Even you are gone. Your voice is so soft that it could be coming to me from the grave.

The wind jumps from roof to roof, slipping over the lead domes. A shadow takes shape in the sky. Growing in the mist on the windowpane, the shadow is now a crow. Now it is perched on top of the church across the street. Now why did it have to go and land right on top of the holy cross?

The north wind is blowing like mad. The old banks of snow look like corpses, bruised and purple, but the hailstones pelting down on them look like millet, glowing gold.

I might leave the house, I might go to a coffeehouse; I might think about whether or not I should go to Istanbul. I might miss the boat back and when night has fallen over the city I might stagger home on a cane. I might sit and read. I might read love stories. We might assume that human love starts here. We might close our minds to our lives, and life itself, and think only of ourselves. We might never stick our heads outside. We might drive away all thoughts of hunger and sickness and people without heating or fire or wood-burning stoves; we might lose ourselves in love stories as we unravel into dreams.

Let the fire tongs and the chair just sit there and wait. Bastards! The birds will always fly up into the sky to look down with piercing eyes. Let’s see if they can spy one tiny piece, one tiny grain of millet.

The snow is falling. Some people come home dressed in fur, some in fancy boots, some in rubber shoes, some in spiked boots, and some holding a cane.

Winter is a nasty business! An evil thing, evil! Turn your eyes away from all the pomp! Turn your eyes from this fake Swiss landscape …

I stand up and push the ever-waiting chair under the table. And those sad fire tongs, still waiting for a human hand — I pull them out from the embers. I lay them beside the stove. The wind and snow have stopped. A cloak of silence has fallen over the village. The sky is pitch black. This vast and neverending winter night is still, is at rest, but once again gathering up more snow. I open first the window and then my mouth to curse the winter night with a foul curse I learned long ago from an Armenian fisherman in Kumkapı.