A Useless Man

Carnations and Tomato Juice

It’s early in the morning, in a little copse of pines. The bees are humming, the mosquitoes buzzing, the birds trilling. It’s dark in here, dark as sunglasses, except for the dappled sunlight filtering down through the trees. And just over there, lapping up against the shore, a little patch of sea. It’s just a shade darker than the sky … And now I am thinking of the villagers who live there. Once upon a time I discovered from books that if I learned to love people, and to delight in nature and in the world by traveling this long road, I would, the books said, learn to love life itself. But I no longer love people by the book. And neither do I have time for the four holy texts or the great tomes of science. It’s fables I learn from, and stories. Poetry and fiction — those are my sciences. But if you wanted to know how I learned to loathe the servant who leaps upon his master to whisk away his luggage the moment he steps off the boat, or how I came to understand that the man who springs out of bed at six-thirty every morning to battle the elements isn’t actually working — well, these were things I taught myself. But should that man choose to linger in bed one morning — well, he can spend the rest of the day trying to fool people for all I care. What difference does it make? His thick wad of banknotes don’t add up to a single coin in my eyes, not a single coin.

I know which people to respect these days. I know which ones to love. Then there are those who’ve been on my mind for days now (but let’s not say that he “occupied” my thoughts).

In the village they call him Mustafa the Blind. One of his eyes is skewed to the left. On the right side of this eye there’s a dark red lump of flesh where the white of his eye meets the lid. Was he born like that? Did something get caught in his eye when he was a child? This weak eye is shinier than the other, and darker, too. There’s more life in it. More wit. It makes me think of a hunchback. How strange. People dismiss hunchbacks as ugly, when in fact they’re charming and warm-hearted, every last one of them. They make the dearest friends. Oh, how much I adore them!

So there you have it. Mustafa the Blind. On one side of his face, an eye with the soul of a hunchback, beckoning and rejoicing, while the eye on the other side of his face is plain and old. It puts on airs. It cowers with shame. But there is never any light in it.

Mustafa the Blind tends gardens. He takes daily jobs: he plasters cisterns, fixes roofs, digs wells, that kind of work.

Few people live on the southern side of our village. It’s really no more than a great tangle of briar, wild oak, arbutus, and shrubs that think they’re trees. The unruly patch belongs to the Fino Church. A wild-eyed and unshaven giant of a priest makes a great show of claiming the land as his. He could, I imagine, have rented it out for some pittance, but he never got around to it. In the meantime a forestry administrator has registered the land as a protected site. So there it sits inside that copse of pines, a tangle of weeds, shrubs, and branches too wiry to burn. Saved by the Forest Code.

And Mustafa the Blind. I don’t know how he did it. But somehow he managed to tame a part of it — the part that went down to the sea. He paid a price, of course. Do you know how he paid? With the nails on his fingers. That’s how. Dig under that tangle of briars and all you’ll find is stone … Nothing but stone. All the way down to the sea. And meanwhile, there was Mustafa, who had no choice but to spend his days working elsewhere.

But in the evenings he would retrieve his shovel from the brambles and dig and hack and weed until the sun came up the next day. He dug out one stone after another. For one winter and one summer he battled the arbutus, laurel, wild oak, and brambles, the roots and thorns and weeds, and the meddling forestry administrator. I don’t think there’s any other man in the village who would engage in such a savage struggle for just three furrows of land.

Cracking through a stone, he would pull out a handful of dark pink heather humus to uncover the root of a wild oak that looked like a terrifying snake. He would yank it out to find the forestry administrator standing over him. After seeing him off, he would notice that his index finger was swollen, pricked by a venomous thorn. His pickaxe would go blunt. His shovel would crack. But on he went, piling up the stones. On the soft earth next to him was a massive stone the size of a man. A mossy-faced man … But Mustafa gave it everything he had. His shoulders, his chest, his back, his feet, his fingernails. Mustering all his power, he vanquished the stone, smashing it to pieces. When his shovel failed, he used his hands, his fingers and his nails, scratching at the earth …

And then, one autumn day, we looked, and the tangle of briars was gone. The pine tree saplings were the only survivors, along with three or four arbutus bushes. Sunlight filtered through the berries and the pine needles, casting shadows over the naked earth. Some of it was olive-brown. But here and there were patches of pink and grey. Those who saw it, said:

“Tend an orchard, or accept a savage vine.”

And that is how we learned that to triumph over nature, you had to fight tooth and nail, and with your blood and guts. With my own eyes I witnessed the battle unfold. I remember days when his blind eye was red with rage. I would sit myself under a pine tree at some distance and watch the cruel battle. And under my breath I’d cheer him on. Mustafa the Lion. That’s what I called him. It was like watching a Roman slave pit himself against a lion, except for this: a slave could slay a lion in the quarter of an hour, but Mustafa took an entire year to conquer this beast, fueled by hope and despair.

One morning I had just settled into my usual place under the pine tree when I saw a village woman and three half-dressed children building something with a strange collection of boards, rocks, and sheet metal. It was a house. A house exposed to all the winds! The poyraz, and the lodos, and the gündoğusu, the keşişleme, the yıldız, and the karayel. Standing behind Mustafa as he divided up the three parcels of land into gardens and seedbeds was that sturdy woman, dressed in green.

“Mustafa the Lion,” I said. “Did you find water?”

“There’s a well down by the shore. It’s salty, but it’ll do. If only I could dig out a cistern here …”

He paused to catch his breath. I paused, in love and admiration and respect. I thought about all the millions of others like him, tilling our fields. Tilling fields the world over. Fighting the dragon with their calluses and their nails, rough-faced, one-eyed, one-armed …

Young ladies, one day, your future husband will send you a dark red carnation. Look at it closely, because it might be one of Mustafa’s. Young men, you know those sweet and sugary tomatoes at the village market, the ones that smell like pullet apples. Slice them open and their seeds will shine like gold. Drink the bottled tomato juice at the local restaurant one day. If you find the taste divine, like the nectar that gives Greek gods eternal life, know that one of Mustafa’s tomatoes was thrown into the mix.