A Useless Man

The Silk Handkerchief

Moonlight shimmered across the silk factory’s long façade. Here and there I could see people hurrying alongside it. But there was nowhere I wished to go. I was making my way out, very slowly, when I heard the watchman call out to me.

“Where are you off to?”

“I’m just going for a stroll,” I said.

“Don’t you want to see the acrobat?”

I hesitated, so he went on:

“Everyone’s going. This is the first time anyone like him has ever come to Bursa.”

“I’m not interested,” I said.

He begged and groveled until I agreed to take his shift. For a while I just sat there. I smoked a cigarette. I sang an old folk song. But soon I was bored. I might as well stretch my legs, I thought. So I picked up the watchman’s studded nightstick and went off to do the rounds.

I had just passed the girls’ workshop when I heard a noise. Taking out my flashlight, I made a sweep of the room. And there, racing along the carpet of light, were two naked feet.

After I had caught the thief, I took him to the watchman’s room, to get a good look at him in the lamp’s yellow glow.

How tiny he was! When I squeezed his small hand in mine, I thought it might break. But his eyes, how they flashed.

I laughed so hard I let go of his hand.

Then he lunged at me with a pocketknife, slicing my pinkie. So I got a tight grip on the little devil and went through his pockets: some contraband tobacco and a few papers of the same sort, and a handkerchief that was almost clean. I dabbed some of his tobacco on the wound, tore a strip from the handkerchief and wrapped it around my finger. With the remaining tobacco we rolled two fat cigarettes and then sat down like two old friends and talked.

He was just fifteen. From which I was to understand that he was new to this business, he was just a boy. You know the story — someone had asked him for a silk handkerchief — a girl he loved, a girl he had his eye on, the girl next door. He couldn’t just go out and buy one, he had no money. So after thinking the matter through, he’d decided on this.

“That’s fine and good,” I said. “But the workshops are on this side of the building. What was it that took you to the other side?”

He smiled. How could he have known which side the workshops were on?

We lit up two of my village cigarettes. By now we were good friends.

He was Bursa born and raised. He had never been to Istanbul — only once in his life had he even been as far as Mudanya. And, oh! To see the look on his face when he told me all this …

As a boy in Emir Sultan, I would often go sledding on moonlit nights, and this boy reminded me of the friends I had made there.

I could imagine his skin going as dark as theirs in the summer. As dark as the water in the Gökdere pools we could hear bubbling in the distance. As dark as the pits of summer fruit.

I looked at him more closely: His olive skin was as dark as a walnut fresh from its green shell. His teeth were as fine and white as the flesh inside. In summer, and right through to the end of walnut season, boys’ hands smell only of peaches and plums in this place and their chests give off the aroma of hazel leaves as they roam the streets half-naked in their buttonless striped shirts.

Just then the watchman’s clock struck twelve; the acrobat’s show was nearly over.

“I should get going,” the boy said.

I was just regretting having sent him on his way without a silk handkerchief when I heard a commotion right outside the door, and the watchman came in muttering under his breath, dragging the thief back in with him.

This time I held him by the ears, while the watchman whacked the soles of his feet with a willow switch. Good thing the boss wasn’t there. I swear he would have called the police. “Thieving at this age,” he’d have cried. “Well, the boy can smarten up in jail.”

He looked scared by the time we were through with him — as if at any moment he might start crying. But he didn’t shed a tear. His lips didn’t tremble and his eyebrows hardly moved. There was only a faint fluttering of eyelashes.

When we let him go he took off like a swallow, vanishing as if he were soaring over a moonlit cornfield.

In those days I slept in the storeroom on the floor above the workshop. How beautiful that room was. And never more so than on moonlit nights.

Just outside my window was a mulberry tree. Moonlight would come cascading down through its leaves, throwing flecks of light across the floor. Summer and winter I left the window open. The wind was never too rough or cold. I had worked on a ferryboat and I knew the different winds from their smells — the lodos, the poyraz, the karayel, and the günbatısı. So many winds swept over me as I lay on that blanket, each one bringing its own strange dreams.

I’m a light sleeper. It was just before daybreak when I heard a noise outside. Someone was in the tree, but I was too afraid to get up or cry out. A shadow appeared in the window.

It was the boy. Slowly he dropped down into the room and when he passed me I shut my eyes. First he went through my cupboard. Then, very slowly, he went through the stockpile. I didn’t say a word. The truth is, even if he’d made off with everything, I could never have said a word in the face of such boldness. In the morning, the boss would beat the truth out of me. “Take that, you dog!” he’d say. He’d tell me a dead man could have done a better job, and then he’d fire me. I knew all this, but still I didn’t say a word.

He slipped out through the window as quietly as he had come. Then I heard a snap. I rushed downstairs and found him lying in the moonlight, while the watchman and a few others looked on.

He was dying. His fist was clenched. When the watchman pried it open, a silk handkerchief shot up from his hand, like water from a spring.

Yes, that’s right. That’s what happens if a handkerchief is pure silk. Crumple it up as tight as you can. But open your hand, and it shoots right up, like water from a spring.