Orbit 6 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Damon Knight

  The old man behind the counter, a German, looked up mournfully to gargle a mournful ach. “Ach, Mr. Harris! Your pictures are not aready yet. Come back soon at twelve o’clock.”

  He walked through the melting streets that were, this side of the Golden Horn, jokebooks of eclecticism. No mail at the consulate, which was only to be expected. Half-past ten.

  A pudding at a pudding shop. Two lire. A cigarette. A few more jokes: a bedraggled caryatid, an Egyptian tomb, a Greek temple that had been changed by some Circean wand into a butcher shop. Eleven.

  He looked, in the bookshop, at the same shopworn selection of books that he had looked at so often before. Eleven-thirty. Surely, they would be ready by now.

  “You are here, Mr. Harris. Very good.”

  Smiling in anticipation, he opened the envelope, removed the slim warped stack of prints.

  No.

  “I’m afraid these aren’t mine.” He handed them back. He didn’t want to feel them in his hand.

  “What?”

  “Those are the wrong pictures. You’ve made a mistake.”

  The old man put on a pair of dirty spectacles and shuffled through the prints. He squinted at the name on the envelope. “You are Mr. Harris.”

  “Yes, that is the name on the envelope. The envelope’s all right, the pictures aren’t.”

  “It is not a mistake.”

  “These are somebody else’s snapshots. Some family picnic. You can see that.”

  “I myself took out the roll of film from your camera. Do you remember, Mr. Harris?”

  He laughed uneasily. He hated scenes. He considered just walking out of the shop, forgetting all about the pictures. “Yes, I do remember. But I’m afraid you must have gotten that roll of film confused with another. I didn’t take these pictures. I took pictures at the cemetery in Eyüp. Does that ring a bell?”

  Perhaps, he thought, “ring a bell” was not an expression a German would understand.

  As a waiter whose honesty has been called into question will go over the bill again with exaggerated attention, the old man frowned and examined each of the pictures in turn. With a triumphant clearing of his throat he laid one of the snapshots face up on the counter. “Who is that, Mr. Harris?”

  It was the boy.

  “Who! I… I don’t know his name.”

  The old German laughed theatrically, lifting his eyes to a witnessing heaven. “It is you, Mr. Harris! It is you!”

  He bent over the counter. His fingers still refused to touch the print. The boy was held up in the arms of a man whose head was bent forward as though he were examining the close-cropped scalp for lice. Details were fuzzy, the lens having been mistakenly set at infinity.

  Was it his face? The mustache resembled his mustache, the crescents under the eyes, the hair falling forward…

  But the angle of the head, the lack of focus—there was room for doubt.

  “Twenty-four lire please, Mr. Harris.”

  “Yes. Of course.” He took a fifty-lire note from his billfold. The old man dug into a lady’s plastic coin purse for change.

  “Thank you, Mr. Harris.”

  “Yes. I’m… sorry.”

  The old man replaced the prints in the envelope, handed them across the counter.

  He put the envelope in the pocket of his suit. “It was my mistake.”

  “Good-bye.”

  “Yes, good-bye.”

  He stood on the street, in the sunlight, exposed. Any moment either of them might come up to him, lay a hand on his shoulder, tug at his pantleg. He could not examine the prints here. He returned to the sweetshop and spread them out in four rows on a marble-topped table.

  Twenty photographs. A day’s outing, as commonplace as it had been impossible.

  Of these twenty, three were so overexposed as to be meaningless and should not have been printed at all. Three others showed what appeared to be islands or different sections of a very irregular coastline. They were unimaginatively composed, with great expanses of bleached-out sky and glaring water. Squeezed between these, the land registered merely as long dark blotches flecked with tiny gray rectangles of buildings. There was also a view up a steep street of wooden houses and naked wintry gardens.

  The remaining thirteen pictures showed various people, and groups of people, looking at the camera. A heavyset woman in black, with black teeth, squinting into the sun—standing next to a pine tree in one picture, sitting uncomfortably on a natural stone formation in the second. An old man, dark-skinned, bald, with a flaring mustache and several days’ stubble of beard. Then these two together—a very blurred print. Three little girls standing in front of a middle-aged woman, who regarded them with a pleased, proprietorial air. The same three girls grouped around the old man, who seemed to take no notice of them whatever. And a group of five men: the spread-legged shadow of the man taking this picture was roughly stenciled across the pebbled foreground.

  And the woman. Alone. The wrinkled sallow flesh abraded to a smooth white mask by the harsh midday light.

  Then the boy snuggling beside her on a blanket. Nearby small waves lapped at a narrow shingle.

  Then these two still together with the old woman and the three little girls. The contiguity of the two women’s faces suggested a family resemblance.

  The figure that could be identified as himself appeared in only three of the pictures: once holding the boy in his arms; once with his arm around the woman’s shoulders, while the boy stood before them scowling; once in a group of thirteen people, all of whom had appeared in one or another of the previous shots. Only the last of these three was in focus. He was one of the least noticeable figures in this group, but the mustached face smiling so rigidly into the camera was undeniably his own.

  He had never seen these people, except, of course, for the woman and the boy. Though he had, hundreds of times, seen people just like them in the streets of Istanbul. Nor did he recognize the plots of grass, the stands of pine, the boulders, the shingle beach, though once again they were of such a generic type that he might well have passed such places a dozen times without taking any notice of them. Was the world of fact really as characterless as this? That it was the world of fact he never for a moment doubted.

  And what had he to place in the balance against these evidences? A name? A face?

  He scanned the walls of the sweetshop for a mirror. There was none. He lifted the spoon, dripping, from his glass of tea to regard the reflection of his face, blurred and inverted, in the concave surface. As he brought the spoon closer, the image grew less distinct, then rotated through one hundred eighty degrees to present, upright, the mirror image of his staring, dilated eye.

  He stood on the open upper deck as the ferry churned, hooting, from the deck. Like a man stepping out of doors on a blustery day, the ferry rounded the peninsular tip of the old city, leaving the quiet of the Horn for the rough wind-whitened waters of the Sea of Marmara. A cold south wind stiffened the scarlet star and cresent on the stern mast.

  From this vantage the city showed its noblest silhouette: first the great gray horizontal mass of the Topkapi walls, then the delicate swell of the dome of St. Irena, which had been built (like a friend carefully chosen to demonstrate, by contrast, one’s own virtues) just to point up the swaggering impossibility of the neighboring Holy Wisdom, that graceless and abstract issue of the union commemorated on every capital within by the twined monograms of the demon-emperor Justinian and his whore and consort Theodora; then, bringing both the topographic and historic sequence to an end, the proud finality of the Blue Mosque.

  The ferry began to roll in the rougher water of the open sea. Clouds moved across the sun at quicker intervals to mass in the north above the dwindling city. It was four-thirty. By five o’clock he would reach Heybeli, the island identified by both Altin and the mail clerk at the consulate as the setting of the photographs.

  The airline ticket to New York was in his pocket. His bags, all but the one he would take on the plane, had been pac
ked and shipped off in a single afternoon and morning of headlong drunken fear. Now he was safe. The certain knowledge that tomorrow he would be thousands of miles away had shored up the crumbling walls of confidence like the promise of a prophet who cannot err, Tiresias in balmy weather. Admittedly this was the shameful safety of a rout so complete that the enemy had almost captured his baggage train—but it was safety for all that, as definite as tomorrow. Indeed, this “tomorrow” was more definite, more present to his mind and senses, than the actual limbo of its preparation, just as, when a boy, he had endured the dreadful tedium of Christmas Eve by projecting himself into the morning that would have to follow and which, when it did finally arrive, was never so real, by half, as his anticipations.

  Because he was this safe, he dared today confront the enemy (if the enemy would confront him) head on. It risked nothing, and there was no telling what it might yield. Though if it were the frisson that he was after, then he should have stayed and seen the thing through to its end. No, this last excursion was more a gesture than an act, bravado rather than bravery. The very self-consciousness with which he had set out seemed to ensure that nothing really disastrous could happen. Had it not always been their strategy before to catch him unaware?

  Finally, of course, he could not explain to himself why he had gone to the ferry, bought his ticket, embarked, except that each successive act seemed to heighten the delectable sense of his own inexorable advance, a sensation at once of almost insupportable tension and of dreamlike lassitude. He could no more have turned back along this path once he had entered on it than at the coda of a symphony he could have refused to listen. Beauty? Oh yes, intolerably! He had never known anything so beautiful as this.

  The ferry pulled into the quay of Kinali Ada, the first of the islands. People got on and off. Now the ferry turned directly into the wind, toward Burgaz. Behind them the European coast vanished into the haze.

  The ferry had left the Burgaz dock and was rounding the tiny islet of Kasik. He watched with fascination as the dark hills of Kasik, Burgaz, and Kinali slipped slowly into perfect alignment with their positions in the photograph. He could almost hear the click of the shutter.

  And the other relationships between these simple sliding planes of sea and land—was there not something nearly as familiar in each infinitesimal shift of perspective? When he looked at these islands with his eyes, half-closed, attention unfocused, he could almost…

  But whenever he tried to take this up, however gently, between the needle-tipped compasses of analysis, it crumbled into dust.

  It began to snow just as the ferry approached Heybeli. He stood at the end of the pier. The ferry was moving eastward, into the white air, toward BÜYÜK ADA.

  He looked up a steep street of wooden houses and naked wintry gardens. Clusters of snowflakes fell on the wet cobbles and melted. At irregular intervals street lamps glowed yellow in the dusk, but the houses remained dark. Heybeli was a summer resort. Few people lived here in the winter months. He walked halfway up the hill, then turned to the right. Certain details of woodwork, the proportion of a window, a sagging roof caught his attention momentarily, like the flicker of wings in the foliage of a tree twenty, fifty, a hundred yards ahead.

  The houses were fewer, spaced farther apart. In the gardens snow covered the leaves of cabbages. The road wound up the hill toward a stone building. It was just possible to make out the flag waving against the gray sky. He turned onto a footpath that skirted the base of the hill. It led into the pines. The thick carpet of fallen needles was more slippery than ice. He rested his cheek against the bark of a tree and heard, again, the camera’s click, systole and diastole of his heart.

  He heard the water, before he saw it, lapping on the beach. He stopped. He focused. He recognized the rock. He walked toward it. So encompassing was his sense of this scene, so inclusive, that he could feel the footsteps he left behind in the snow, feel the snow slowly covering them again. He stopped.

  It was here he had stood with the boy in his arms. The woman had held the camera to her eye with reverent awkwardness. He had bent his head forward to avoid looking directly into the glare of the setting sun. The boy’s scalp was covered with the scabs of insect bites.

  He was ready to admit that all this had happened, the whole impossible event. He did admit it. He lifted his head proudly and smiled, as though to say: All right—and then? No matter what you do, I’m safe! Because, really, I’m not here at all. I’m already in New York.

  He laid his hands in a gesture of defiance on the outcropping of rock before him. His fingers brushed the resilient thong of the slipper. Covered with snow, the small oval of blue plastic had completely escaped his attention.

  He spun around to face the forest, then round again to stare at the slipper lying there. He reached for it, thinking to throw it into the water, then drew his hand back.

  He turned back to the forest. A man was standing just outside the line of the trees, on the path. It was too dark to discern any more of his features than that he had a mustache.

  On his left the snowy beach ended in a wall of sandstone. To his right the path swung back into the forest, and behind him the sea dragged the shingle back and forth.

  “Yes?”

  The man bent his head attentively, but said nothing.

  “Well, yes? Say it.”

  The man walked back into the forest.

  The ferry was just pulling in as he stumbled up to the quay. He ran onto it without stopping at the booth to buy a ticket. Inside under the electric light he could see the tear in his trousers and a cut on the palm of his right hand. He had fallen many times, on the pine needles, over rocks in furrowed fields, on cobbles.

  He took a seat by the coal stove. When his breath returned to him, he found that he was shivering violently. A boy came round with a tray of tea. He bought a glass for one lira. He asked the boy, in Turkish, what time it was. It was ten o’clock.

  The ferry pulled up to the dock. The sign over the ticket booth said BÜYÜK ADA. The ferry pulled away from the dock.

  The ticket taker came for his ticket. He held out a ten-lire note and said, “Istanbul.”

  The ticket taker nodded his head, which meant no.

  “Yok.”

  “No? How much then? Kaç para?”

  “Yok Istanbul—Yalova.” He took the money offered him and gave him back in exchange eight lire and a ticket to Yalova on the Asian coast.

  He had got onto a ferry going in the wrong direction. He was not returning to Istanbul, but to Yalova.

  He explained, first in slow precise English, then in a desperate fragmentary Turkish, that he could not go to Yalova, that it was impossible. He produced his airline ticket, pointed at the eight o’clock departure time, but he could not remember the Turkish word for “tomorrow.” Even in his desperation he could see the futility of all this: between BÜYÜK ADA and Yalova there were no more stops, and there would be no ferries returning to Istanbul that night. When he got to Yalova he would have to get off the boat.

  A woman and a boy stood at the end of the wooden dock, at the base of a cone of snowy light. The lights were turned off on the middle deck of the ferry. The man who had been standing so long at the railing stepped, stiffly, down to the dock. He walked directly toward the woman and the boy. Scraps of paper eddied about his feet then, caught up in a strong gust, sailed out at a great height over the dark water.

  The man nodded sullenly at the woman, who mumbled a few rapid words of Turkish. Then they set off, as they had so many times before, toward their home, the man leading the way, his wife and son following a few paces behind, taking the road along the shore.

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