A Useless Man

Barba Antimos

On the wall is a picture of an English aristocrat at the Imperial Court, asking for the Queen’s forgiveness. But more remarkable than that is the advertisement for “The Optimus,” a modern oil lamp.

The lamp hangs from a rope on the deck of a motorboat. It sways in the wind, while fishermen underneath it heave in a net full of fish.

The canary chirps inside its cage. Restless titmice hop from one perch down to the next. The air above the stove is shimmering. Fisherman Kanari steps inside with snow on his graying blond moustache. The canary chirps again.

“Do you know Barba Antimos?”

He is a stonemason who at the age of eighty finds himself all alone on an island, far from his wife and children, as old as the pictures on the walls, and just as alive. He no longer has a boat or a fishing net, and his heart harbors no desires. His only belongings are the Priyol watch in his pocket, the red scarf around his neck, the woolen socks on his feet, and the smoke rising from his thick Maxim Gorki moustache. As for his memories — choose any year, and he’ll have little to tell you. He might tell you about a wall he mended, and that would be it. It’s not that he’s reticent. It’s just that he prefers peace and quiet. He would, I’m sure, love to spend another eighty years on this earth, building and mending and plastering walls. And dozing by the stove in the Kornil coffeehouse, while in his dreams he was already escaping through the heather to his one-room house with a loaf of bread under his arm and fresh tobacco in his case. But time is as fickle as the wind: the lodos gives way to the poyraz and then it is the turn of the karayel. As we drag ourselves through life, it’s the rhythm of our days that seem to offer constancy. But this, too, will change. One day Barba Antimos will die.

“Barba Antimos built that wall over there,” we’ll say. “He used to sit there by that stove in the Kornil coffeehouse. At eighty, his eyes were still sharp and his hands still nimble enough to tuck a cigarette inside that moustache. And when he blew out the smoke, he’d puff out his cheeks.” That’s how we shall remember him, unless we descend into oblivion first.

Today the canary is singing, while our feet turn to ice, but one day the canary will stop singing. Apostol the Greengrocer will stop feeding rakı to Marco the Donkey. Pandeli Efendi the Milkman will no longer sit beneath that magnificent image of the British Queen with Puços, the Kornil’s resident cat, in his lap. And never again will he tell us how he was sentenced to the tombs when he’d already paid his taxes or how much effort it took to change the court’s decision. Knowing all this, I leave the coffeehouse. I leave behind the fragrant stink of rubber, fish, tobacco, and ink. I wend my way home. The moment I’m there, I’ll get started. I shall put down on paper every year of Barba Antimos’s on this earth.

The folk remedies they’d suggested for his ulcer didn’t always work. There were times when he would almost complain. The lines on his face would deepen, as if to bemoan his eighty years of stoic, noble sacrifice. Blurred by sadness, his blue eyes would seem to question human company and the rule it enforced. And perhaps these were the times when the ulcer was giving him the most pain. When he spoke directly about the ulcer, the pain was probably less severe. He had been at home for days, alone with his pain. And maybe that was why he’d come out — so that he could grumble about the pain on his way down the hill, or even before he started.

“How goes it, Barba Antimos?”

“Not so good. It’s quite troubling, sir. I can’t sleep, can’t eat. I had a little soup yesterday. But that made me …”

“It’ll pass, Barba Antimos.”

He pursed his lips. He had beautiful lips. The lips of a five-year-old child.

“The doctor at the Bulgarian hospital gave me some medicine, but it doesn’t always work. You just never know.”

Lean on any wall on this island. Sit on it. Climb over it or pelt it with stones. Whatever you do, you will find in it his mortar, sweat, and toil. You will find no mosaics in them, no ersatz wood or stone. He makes his walls the same way they made them two thousand years ago, and they hide secrets just as old. Greek gods, epic lovers, heroes railing against injustice. Touch a wall that Barba Antimos has made, and you touch antiquity. Pull a bag of Byzantine gold out of one of his cisterns — just three years old — and you’d be hard pressed to find an archaeologist to challenge its authenticity. Grow a boxwood vine over an arbor outside one of his cottages and it won’t be long before you’re expecting Socrates himself to greet you the moment you step inside. And then, one summer night, when you’re sitting at your table drinking wine, you’ll see Alcibiades draw his blade on Socrates and say: “Fine then, have it your way. But tell me this. How can a man live as long as you have without becoming an immortal? Why, after eighty years of gathering wisdom and unearthing secrets, and finally discovering true happiness, must he leave this world behind?”

Should you lack the confidence to guess how Socrates might have answered such a question, you hold your tongue. Instead you gaze up at the stars through the dangling grapes and then down at your glass of wine. Then, with Homer at your side, you follow a path that winds among the walls and houses and hollowed cisterns that grace the island with nothing but good taste; you find the true path that runs from Byzantium to the simplicity and poetry of the ancient Greek world, and away from the monstrous villas of the modern age.

Barba Antimos never falters in the face of adversity. He makes just enough to get by. As long as his arms are strong, he brings beauty to everything he touches. But when his ulcer flares up, not even 250 grams of Halvah wedged in bread can bring him comfort. His gnarled and knotted muscles go limp. And all that’s left of him is the light in his clear blue eyes and the smoke in his blond, Maxim Gorki moustache and his long, mortar-white hair. No one remembers what he did anymore — the houses he embellished, the walls he strengthened, the lime he covered with mortar and made beautiful with his hands.

Did he know how beautiful he made everything he touched? Would he be so humble if he did? If it had been his apprentice Hristo, we would never have heard the end of it. “Now that’s one of my walls,” he would have said. “Rip out a few stones and it’ll still be standing.” But Barba Antimos — he never said a thing.

Now he lives with Diyojen in one of his own houses, but every couple of days he comes down to drink milk with his old friend and compatriot, Pandeli Usta. Some mornings I see him drinking milk in Pandeli’s dairy shop. Draining his glass, he smiles as if his face has been caressed by a mountain breeze. And his eyes look pure enough to drink; they look like milk. Barba Antimos never breathes a word of his sorrow. But I’ll tell you.

For forty years now he has carried a secret, a bitter and unspeakable secret. For forty years now, he has been pouring his grief into his walls. And some evenings, when I lean against them, I can feel them shuddering, shaking, trembling.