A Useless Man

I Can’t Go into Town

I seem to be starting another story. But it’s been months since I picked up a pen. As if I might actually come up with something. I doubt it. But that’s fine. Truth is I’m happy with the way things are. So what’s come over me tonight? What made me sit down to scribble out these lines? If I really put my mind to it, I could come up with a good lie. I could claim to be driven by some mysterious force. But that’s not it. It’s always like this. I can dash out a story while I wait for a ferry, balancing on one foot.

Don’t take this the wrong way, now. I’m not pretending someone just asked me how I write. That I could never pin down. I’m just taking a closer look at the evening. Now I’ll admit that it was a dark mood that brought me to this sheet of yellow paper that I picked up at the corner store. What I’m trying to understand is why one dark mood leads me to an even darker one, when there are so many other things I could do to chase it away.

That’s just how it is. But why? I have all these books to read. I don’t have much money, but I have a home. I have a wood-burning stove and food. There’s a radio downstairs … I can’t go into town. I just can’t go, but you’re not to think I don’t have it in me to climb a mountain. Ha! I’d throw on my cap and it’s high-ho to Kalpazankaya. The sun’s nearly setting. Oh God, watch out! “The sun’s nearly setting.” Now for a description of the world. But my heart’s just not in it: no painting the waves for me tonight, no toasting the horizon like a slice of bread.

See! We did it again. We painted the waves. We toasted the horizon just perfectly.

That’s just how we are. We were trained to write bad literature: there’s no way around it. We should turn back to poetry.

I said I couldn’t go into town. Why not? So here’s the crux of the matter. Over the last four or five lines I’ve been holding back a secret. Something really strange. The key is in the sentence, I can’t go into town. I can’t tell you how much I’d like to unravel it for you. But it’s not in my power. No really, it’s there. I just can’t write it down. Wouldn’t they laugh at me if I did? But what’s wrong with that? If man wasn’t born to be ridiculed, then he was born to laugh at others. It all leads to the same door. Or it leads nowhere. They’re one and the same. But I can. I hate to see someone laughed at. Do I like to be laughed at? Who would? That goes without saying. Well then you’ll say, look, you’re making a distinction. But if I were to say I did this to feel more human, you couldn’t say I was soft in the head. And if you did, then the hell with it! All men are flawed, all animals, too …

What if I told you I was a civil servant, and relatively well-off? Earning as much as four or five hundred lira a month. With two daughters. Who are at the school just over there. With a confident, well-dressed woman for a wife. I bring home all the money I earn. My main monthly expense is a kilo of rakı. We have a refrigerator at home, I don’t know how it got there, but it’s there. I keep the bottles inside. Sometimes, at the beginning of the month, I still have one bottle with two fingers left in it. I hold myself back so I can share a little with a friend who swings by in the evening. No matter what state he’s in! Let’s say I have other bad habits. I have a few running tabs here and there. To be paid at the top of the month, of course. There’s a debt of sixty-three lira and eighty-five kuruş that I’ll need to wriggle away from the wife. Maybe I spent it all carousing. Maybe it’s just a small tab at the tobacconist, for newspapers and Bafra cigarettes; two or three beers and a lemon soda at the club; and almost seventeen lira at the patisserie.

How can I go into town when I still haven’t paid off last month’s debts, when I also need fifty-six lira for other inevitable expenses? I can’t show my face down there, can I? I could end the story just like that. Some would laugh. Others would pity me. Some would say, “Now there’s a real story.”

Some would be delighted and say, “He can’t write any more.” But then you all know that I’m not a civil servant. A civil servant might be the type to get hung up on the shopkeeper or the street sweeper, or tobacconist — schmabacconist! Or maybe not. He might not. If he did, he wouldn’t owe more than three packs of Bafra, three cones from the ice-cream man, no more than seven coffees from the coffee house. Ipso facto, I wouldn’t care if I did.

That’s not why I can’t go into town. Well then, why can’t I? Are you even interested? I doubt it. You couldn’t care less, I’m sure. If you think I’m making too big a deal of this, go ahead and say so. But it’s not being able to go downtown that gave me the key to this story. If I tried to explain why, though … it would take me too long. So why waste more time? Let’s just say I can’t bear seeing anyone and end it there.

Enough of this! From now on: I just can’t go into town, and that’s that.

Oh, these prohibitions! These prohibitions that we place on ourselves. And the ones that others place on us and we place on them. That the state places on its citizens, and the citizens on the state, and municipalities on residents, and residents on the municipality …

If we can’t live in a world of prohibitions, then how can we live in a world without them? Why is it that animals, even our pets, can live quite happily without them? They lead simple lives, bounding here and there, feeling oh so fine, apart from the racket they kick up when they need to kill their hunger — while we seem to believe that we can’t survive, unless we’re hemmed in by laws. We might even describe humans as animals who are against the law. Isn’t each and every germ against the law? Love is against the law, too. The day will come when water and food will be, too. We’ll each be out of bounds for all others.

I can’t kiss that beautiful boy when I want to! I can’t swim in the sea when I want to; my lungs are weak and the doctor has forbidden it. I can’t drink when I want to; it’s come to the point where I’m afraid, it strangles my mind, my liver forbids it. I can’t just hop onto a boat for Haydarpaşa and huff it all the way out to Van. I’d croak along the way … I can’t go into town. God damn the place anyway. The shopkeeper from Karaman might very well have pearls threaded into his moustache and he may have gilded his hair in gold. He might have encased his entire body in silver. But then what’s silver to him?

And the delicatessen — that man has stocked his place so full of food that even if he took all his sausages to the pier, and got a fire going, and invited the whole town to get their fill of sausage and wine, while the cats swarmed, and the dogs howled, and the torches flamed, even if he banded together with all the fishermen and Kurdish porters and cats and dogs of all the summer houses of Istanbul to put on a wedding party lasting forty days and forty nights, only then would he run out of supplies. And if on the forty-first day he got in more salami and sausages, and fresh cheese and wine, he’d have enough to enrich himself for another forty days.

He’d still wander around town in his disgusting apron, sucking on the fenugreek seeds in his teeth. That dark moustache would still glisten with oil, and his skin would still stink of garlic. His stomach would still be sprinkled with cheese crumbs, and his wrists would be as thick as my ankles.

And then — the baker! That bullwhip of a baker who flogs his oil-drenched pastry off on the child laborers in the morning for thirty-five kuruş. That’s all very well, but he never gives you change and you’re always too scared to ask for it because he’ll just give you more bread instead. He’s always having new houses built so he can rent them out. He lets his goats gobble through the freshest shrubbery in the village …

And then there’s the master butcher you can smell from fifty feet away, who sits in his chair from morning till night, dreaming of goats and buffaloes and fatty organs, who pads that nasty organ fat into every half kilo of meat he puts through his grinder. You might think I don’t want to go into town because I don’t want to look these people in the eye. But that’s not it, not at all, that’s not why I won’t go into town, because be sure that if I did, I’d call out to the shopkeeper, “Hey Barba Niko,” and to the baker, “Oho, master Haralambo,” and to the butcher, “Oooooh, Abdülbekir.”

It’s not like they’re the only ones in town. There’s Iskanavi, the proprietor of our coffeehouse. A man without a care in the world. He doesn’t even know the meaning of money. He’s just a little more distracted when he doesn’t have it, like anyone else. And when he has it, he’s always laughing. For him, a ten-lira note and a hundred-lira note are more or less the same thing. He doesn’t ask for much. He’s a sweet man. During one of the wars, he hid in the attic until it was over. He only came out to the square when the armistice was announced. He had all kinds of stories about his days up in the attic.

What hardship! During the war he had to rent out his home for the summer. His wife would stare up at the ceiling for hours, marveling at how her husband could live up there without ever making a sound. One day he was driven almost insane by the sound of people dancing the Hasapiko. Another day the tenants were astounded to see a knife from a hole in the ceiling plunge into a chunk of cheese sitting on the dinner table, only to float back up to the attic, right before their very eyes. Once they learned how it got up there, and why, and that the author of this act had done so while perfectly sane, they began to have him down for dinner every night.

He was a crafty little fellow.

And then there’s barber Hilmi, with his sparkling eyes and his shiny bald pate — if he starts on his sensational tales from his youth, just watch out. He’ll leave you rolling on the floor. Oh, the tricks this handsome barber played on his lovers. Always a happy ending, but so many twists and turns along the way. He has such a light touch. How gracefully he weaves in the guile and the subterfuge, how much sweeter life was then, and how playful.

Who else? There’s Pandeli Efendi the milkman. He used to keep an old pistol hanging in his shop. People who came in after six were members of the club. The Firing Club. Blasts of all kinds were fair game.

Now this may seem a little unsavory, but the truth is if a member didn’t fire one off from the mouth (or some other orifice) the exact moment he stepped in through the door, he was out of the game. But if he did, Pandeli Efendi would push aside the heavy, old veteran cooks and gardeners and greengrocers and put him at the head of the table. Nobody ever laughed. But it was there in our eyes, unless, of course, the shot had overwhelmed us. And slowly it would fade and the discussion would turn to the news of the day and the foolishness of those who make money only to squirrel it away. Having passed a motion to the effect that people like this are never satisfied until they die, the meeting would adjourn.

Why won’t I go into town then? I’m a member of the club. I could listen to a world of stories for the price of a haircut. I’d split my sides laughing. Or I could swing by Iskanvi Efendi’s coffeehouse.

“So, Iskanavi Efendi,” I’d say. “What happened when the old woman saw that piece of cheese floating up to the ceiling?”

“She made a cross on her chest and said ‘Panaya mou.’ Then, ‘Viresi’ and ‘Calliope’ and ‘Ti pzagma, tinatnoyni.’ ”

“But why the hell did you expose yourself like that?”

“I got tired of it all, brother. I wanted them to know that I was up there. I made so much noise up there at night, but neither the husband nor the wife ever got up. They were dead to the world. But sometimes they would get up and call to my wife. ‘Viresi,’ they’d say. ‘Calliope! Pondika! It sounds like there’s a rat as big as a man up there!’ And I was worried that they’d talk about it and the whole thing would get out of hand. So that was my way of telling them that there weren’t rats in the attic.”

So there you go. The town is haram, it’s sinful. I can imagine it now, all those little twenty-five watt bulbs glowing, and all the flies. I want to explain why — why I can’t go downtown. But what use would that be? Who’d care?

I put on my hat and my fisherman’s jacket and I wrapped a scarf around my head like I had a toothache. I went out and walked past the coffeehouse. He was there, he was there.

I came back home. I got into bed and turned off the light. I thought for a while. I thought about killing anyone who said I couldn’t go into town, no matter who it was. It was the first time I’d ever had a thought like that.

I got dressed again and went back out. I went straight to the coffeehouse. I walked to the far end and sat down. His face went bright yellow when he saw me. His lips were trembling. In the coffeehouse mirror I saw the white, jaundiced face of a man. I flinched — it was me. I got out of there fast.

“Iskanavi,” I said, “I’ll have a coffee. Now about that attic story …”

He was broke and in a bad mood.

“You’ve got nothing to worry about,” he said. “Your salt is dry. But mine — δεν εíναι, no.”

I could finish the story like that. It would be one of my classic endings. It could be, but no. I don’t go into town, I don’t go into that bright white coffeehouse. I don’t sit down opposite someone who doesn’t want to see me, and I don’t say a word to the proprietor.

I’m at home, in my room. I can’t go into town. I have a fever of thirty-nine degrees. I’m cold and trembling. Sometimes I’m on fire. My mother rubs vinegar on my temples. No more reading, she says. It’s time to sleep. She turns off the light and leaves. I listen to the sounds around me. The dogs on Spoon Island are still barking. The wind is pounding the windowpanes, rattling the doors. I switch on the light …

Well that would be another kind of ending, but this isn’t it either. No, this isn’t the one either. I can’t go into town, and that’s that.