A Useless Man

Wedding Night

Ahmet was sixteen, but his birth had yet to be registered. He had the flattest of noses and the narrowest of foreheads and jet black hair that shone with glints of midnight blue. He already had whiskers. Inside his navy serge suit, his body looked slender, athletic, and perfectly formed. When his father presented him to the registrar, the man did not hide his displeasure.

“Shame on you!” he said. “And why was it, I wonder, that you’ve taken so long to register this young man’s birth? What sort of tricks did you pull during the census?”

During the census they’d hidden him in the hayloft. There had been rumors of another war. Ahmet was just twelve years old at the time, and their only son, but the army could still have taken him. That’s what they’d reckoned. It had turned out differently, but what did it matter? Ahmet wasn’t like Turkey’s other children. Ahmet’s father was Rüstem Ağa and even after the threat of war had passed, there had still been a need for precautions.

The registrar asked, “Is this boy twenty yet?”

It had been decided that sixteen-year-old Ahmet had been born in 1909. And that he was to marry a twenty-six-year-old woman born in 1911.

It was a dark autumn night, and the rain was pelting down. The sky was wandering the streets. A band of men holding lanterns was hurrying Ahmet across the village square, which was littered with the crushed husks of chestnuts. Pulling Ahmet to the back of the group, Black Abdi said his piece once again:

“Ahmet,” he said, “I’m your best man. So now listen to me carefully.” (Here he paused.) “When we’ve pushed you in there and closed the door on you, what you do next is kneel down on the rug and pray twice for God’s blessing. Do you understand?”

The rain was really coming down now. The gutters were gushing, and the lanterns were far ahead of them. They had forgotten to look out for puddles. Their trousers were sopping wet.

The young men in the coffeehouse wiped the mist off the windows; seeing Ahmet pass by with his best man, they smiled. The old men, whose minds were on their taxes, rose to stand at the door, sending him on his way with strange jokes.

Ahmet was so startled that he fell into a pile of chestnuts and hurt himself. As Abdi lifted him up, he called out to the men who were racing away with their lanterns.

“Wait for us, will you?” Then, turning back to Ahmet, he said, “The rest you know. You’re old enough, and big enough. Don’t make me spell it out for you.”

Ahmet said nothing. The chestnut thorns still stung. He was chewing on something, but were they questions, or were they chestnuts? It was hard to tell. His mind was fogged by the rakı they’d given him, and then they’d pulled him into this procession, and now their will was his command.

As they led him along, they showered this lean, solidly built and bright-eyed boy with taunts that seemed somehow serious.

Gülsüm’s house was so very far away tonight. The rain was coming down even harder now. They were almost running. When at last they reached the house, the women inside threw open the door. The groom was covered head-to-toe in mud. The women brushed him off. His navy serge suit was now the same color as his hair. The wet, shiny down on his cheeks made this ugly child look almost handsome. He seemed to be wet from perspiration, not rain, and after he had wiped his face with a cloth, it looked red and polished like an apple.

His eyes were downcast; he was still picking thorns out of his hands. They brought him coffee and, paying no heed to Abdi’s advice, he knocked it back. He hadn’t trembled like this since his circumcision four years earlier. Then they brought him to his feet and, pounding with their fists on his back, they pushed him into a room, and then closed the door and left.

The room had a low ceiling and was lined with hanging bunches of grapes, apples, pears and quinces. There was almost no light, and the stench of fruit was so strong it made him dizzy. But it wasn’t just the fruit. Hovering above it was the hint of fine muslin, a bride’s dress, and a fine body underneath.

He went over to the open window and shut it, and for a moment he lingered, looking through the glass to watch the men and women coming out of each house to join the lantern procession. With his hands he wiped the fly droppings from the top of the dresser and adjusted the photograph of a soldier. He turned down the gas lamp. The woman was standing before him, utterly still. And now he caught sight of the prayer rug. Folding it up, he threw it into a corner. Pausing before the mirror, he looked at his red face. The woman was sitting by the window now. And there in the corner was the empty mattress, just like Black Abdi had predicted. “You are going to sit down next to her,” Black Abdi had said, “and for an hour at least, you are going to talk to her.” But what could he say to a girl he’d never met? His head was on fire, and his nerves were playing on the edges of his bones, one by one. Again, he examined himself in the mirror. For a long while he stared at the lantern wick, as if he were searching for something, and then, with one twist of his thick hands, he extinguished the flame. He could see the woman sitting by the window, staring out into the night and the rain.

Quietly Ahmet walked over to the bed and sat down next to her. He pressed his head into his trembling hands … He couldn’t think. He could hear the rain pelting down, and the crowd outside growing louder, but everything else was spinning around inside him. The wheel was unraveling. He was falling down a well. The problem wasn’t in his head, he thought. It was everywhere else. If only the dogs could stop barking, if only the rain would stop pelting down like this for just a moment, then he could think. Bright bolts of lightning cast the room in a blue light. Until now, he had thought himself locked in a room alone somehow, but now he saw the large frightened eyes of the woman sitting across from him. He began to wonder if that blue light came from inside this ghostly creature and her white muslin şalvar. Was it the chestnut thorns that were making his hands ache? Or was it that he’d eaten so much that evening? Was that why he felt so much pain and heaviness in his stomach? His sight was blurred, his mind fogged, his sweat cold. Seized by a malarial seizure, he curled himself up into a tiny ball.

Toward morning, he woke to find the woman curled up at the other end of the mattress, still dressed in her muslins, or almost.

Though the rain had lessened, it was still pouring down on the half-lit square. The dogs were still barking. The cattle were passing, their wet bells ringing in the mist. They were followed by gloomy shepherds, surrounded by goats and cowering under their sacks.

Gülsüm was awake now, too. She looked pale. She was trying to smile. The morning light from the window cast a mist over the hanging fruit. Ahmet was thirsty. He seized a bunch of grapes. With a second bunch of grapes in his hands, he approached the pale girl on the bed and popped two grapes into her mouth. How bright she looked in the half-lit room as, saying nothing, he pressed his thick, wet lips against her neck.

The sun rose, flickering in the mirror and their eyes. They opened the curtains.