by Ayfer Tunç
Aziz Bey’s tragedy begins with Maryam: simply because he fell in love with her. This love like a blind eye, a paralysed right arm, a heart missing a beat, always gave him pain but lived on with him.
It would have been all right if only he had been able to think of Maryam as one of those broad-bosomed, teary-eyed women on the list he kept when he was a teenager. It would have been all right if it were just a sexual desire that had stirred inside him, if he had looked at Maryam’s body as fresh as a sapling hastening to grow, as a very thirsty person looks at a frosty glass of water, if he had just been content to desire that body. But Aziz Bey looked into Maryam’s eyes. That eyes were dangerous, he under -stood only after Maryam. If he had not kept thinking about her eyes that spoke, if he had not flushed to the tips of his toes when he saw her, if his knees had not shaken, his tongue had not stuck to the roof of his mouth, Aziz Bey would have been a man like everyone else.
What would have happened if he had been a man like everyone else? Nothing… But perhaps he would have lived longer. Perhaps he would have aged by rotting gradually, become bent and would have forgotten the song, Months pass and I’m still waiting for you to come. He would have married a woman who talked incessantly and grew fatter by the day. He would have left that semblance of an office and joined a largeish firm. He would have earned more money, each month he would have got hold of pen and paper and drawn up long accounts and each time decided to give up smoking. He would have had twin boys whose heads he would have clipped for always breaking windows playing ball, and whom he would have wanted to study to be a prosecutor or a judge, or perhaps he would have had a girl. He would then learn that his daughter had slept with all the young lads in the neighbourhood, and this would have caused him great anguish. However, he would have been so entangled with life that he would pretend he didn’t know. Feigning ignorance would not offend him; he would not question why it had not offended.
If it had not been for that touching thing he thought he had caught in Maryam’s eyes, that dripped like a bitter draught into his heart, Aziz Bey would have died one day slumped over a steel desk with a sheet of glass cut for the top, filling in the same old ledgers, because life would have ordered him to work on, even though he should have retired long ago.
And so he would have lived a life like everyone else.
But that’s not what happened after Maryam. Aziz Bey, who was spoiled by the appreciation of women whom he scorned, was transfixed one day by Maryam’s black eyes, deep as a well, looking out from behind a net curtain. ‘I was as good as bewitched’ was how he described that unforgettable moment to those who at the time he was very close to, most of whom are now no longer alive. It was as though what he experienced at that moment was not love but a divine call. What he saw was not a pair of eyes but the first sign of a strange destiny calling him to a warm but dark and mysterious world. That this world was poisonous, he realised much later.
And yet, it’s impossible to rule out the role fate in his story. If he had not worked in that office, if the way to the office had not passed in front of Maryam’s house, if Maryam’s family had not lived on the ground floor of that shabby apartment, if that pair of well-like eyes that he had fallen in love with had not been at home all day sitting in front of the window (she had left work because her boss had gone bankrupt), none of this would have befallen him.
But what had befallen him? It was just a love gone wrong; that is all. Whose life doesn’t contain an unhappy love story? However, Aziz Bey’s unhappy love story permeated his whole life like a road of no return, an illness that somehow never got better. As Aziz Bey tried to catch the mistake, he walked towards the mistake as though walking towards a yellow leaf that the wind continually blew in front of him, he just could not catch it.
Whenever he thought about Maryam he felt a sweet coolness on his tongue. A feeling tasting of peppermint roamed inside him. Then a long lasting bitterness would take its place. He always avoided remembering the time preceding this love, the moments of indecisiveness whether or not to begin, those most delectable moments, the dreamiest stage. In fact he was right to want to forget. As he remembered, he remembered how his life had changed its course and how he had been crushed under the load of a weighty misconception.
Furthermore, in the beginning theirs too was a love like everyone else’s. But fate obstructed it from progressing like every -one else’s. From chance meetings, ostensibly returning from the market as he left work; bashful smiles as their eyes met; the dropping of notes with meeting places written on them; they progressed to brief meetings out of sight that in time became longer. Kissing, making love… Cinemas were visited, boxes reserved; there was swimming at Kilyos; caramelised milk puddings eaten at pudding shops with marble tables. The house was left with little lies. Loitering in vain in front of post offices when the other couldn’t leave the house…
It would have been all right if it had carried on like this.
If Maryam’s family had not decided to go to Beirut in search of a living, this everyday love would have stretched like chewing gum and perished; what with moods, jealousies and quarrels, it would have run its course and each of them would have put it down to a youthful passion. An Aziz Bey crossed in love would have caused trouble in the taverns, gone round wreaking havoc, philandered a little longer, settled down with time and would have married a suitable girl that his mother would have found for him. The same would go for Maryam. She probably would have married a clumsy, ineffectual, cowardly shoe-seller or meze cook, who first checked his safe as soon as he opened his shop and who dozed on the sofa at night. She would have had a summerhouse on the Islands. On starry, hot summer nights she would not be able to sleep for thinking about Aziz Bey, his body full of life. Maryam would very likely be richer and would not even live in the same district as Aziz Bey. Perhaps Maryam would catch a glimpse of him while out shopping one day and be made giddy by her old love, she would walk around her house for a while like a zombie…
Anyway… That’s not what happened. Maryam came from a poor family. Her uncle Artin, a furrier, had settled in Beirut a while before. Maryam did not know that her father and uncle had been corresponding for some time and that her uncle insistently summoned her father to Beirut, to be his dependable assistant in this foreign land. One Sunday evening, her father announced his decision. They were not getting anywhere in this country. He was fed up of working himself to the bone. That is why the whole family was to go to Beirut and share in uncle Artin’s work. Although that night Maryam cried until the morning thinking of Aziz Bey, she was quickly seduced by the postcards, photographs, the smartness of her cousins and the happy smiles that came from Beirut during the week following this decision.
Maryam used to say, ‘It will only be a few months before we come back, my father won’t be able to cope there.’ She convinced Aziz Bey too. She indicated a vague departure date – today or tomorrow – but never a precise day and time, making it obvious she did not want to say goodbye.
One morning, when Aziz Bey least expected it, as he was going to the office, a horse and cart suddenly appeared in front of him in the street where Maryam lived. Goods sold to the rag and bone man were being loaded onto the cart. He took shelter in the shade of an apartment at the top end of the street and watched the armchairs, coffee tables, thin mattresses, quilts, tinned copper pans, samovar, and even old coats and winter boots being loaded onto the cart. His eyes brimmed with tears. Without moving, he watched the commotion of this family, a member of which was also the girl he loved, preparing to leave for a new country. Then Maryam, her mother, father and sister, hands akimbo, glanced at their home from outside, and loaded a few shabby old cases, tied tightly with washing line, into a chequered taxi. Waving to their neighbours, they got into the taxi with smiling, hopeful faces and departed.
That day Aziz Bey was hurt for the first time. Even if Maryam had not told him about her departure, he thought she would have been sad, tearful and reluctant; she would have turned and gone into the
house a few times. In the image of departure he visualised, Maryam would sit, crying in front of the front door, her mother tugging her up by the arms, her father kicking the taxi’s wheels and shaking his index finger furiously at Maryam, while her mother stepped in front of her husband in order to stop him beating her, while her sister whispered in her ear, begging. Maryam should not have been able to get up and go at all, as she gazed towards the end of the street, looking for Aziz Bey.
That’s not what happened. Maryam, like the others, bustled in and out of the apartment, carried belongings, and never once turned her head to look towards the end of the street. Had she looked she would have seen Aziz Bey’s eyes filled with tears, his hurt, unhappy, besotted state.
Ruling out events such as his quarrels with his father and his grandfather’s death, this departure was the first disaster in Aziz Bey’s life. The subsequent tragic events were added to this first large ring and thus Aziz Bey’s life became a very long chain woven from sad times. The good and happy days in the interim were not able to change this melancholy mood one little bit. Whenever Aziz Bey looked back on his life he saw that all that was left from all those years that had been lived, were just a few melancholy and fractured stories.
If that departure, which felt like a nail being separated from his flesh, had not taken place, this love would not really have been love. Aziz Bey went crazy with love; he was too young. He thought that there could never be a greater torment than this and that he would end up dying in the streets deliriously calling Maryam’s name. However, he did not know that there are very few moments when the body does not betray the soul: no matter how much one would love to waste away and die after great grief, one cannot succeed. The soul struggles to rise to the heavens donning a black halo but the body is worldly; it eats, drinks and lives.
Aziz Bey did not die; he could not die, but he was no longer able to notice the looks of mature women who enjoyed escapades, hooked on his dark and sharp features; he could no longer read the desire in their trembling nostrils. He lost weight; he grew pale. While his mother feared that he would contract tuberculosis, his father knew, as did the whole neighbourhood, and was proud of the mass of love affairs. He thought that this too was a passing affair of the heart and did not take any notice, saying simply, ‘such things happened to me too, he’ll recover,’ and thereby reminding his wife of his former lovers and probably breaking her heart for the umpteenth time.
After this departure, Aziz Bey began to think that it was not worth believing in love and falling under its power. Just as he had decided to be more ruthless towards women, a long letter arrived from Maryam. It was sincere, touching and extremely romantic. All Aziz Bey’s views on love changed in a trice. Man needs to love someone, and to love passionately.
He began to write long and poetic letters to Maryam. His writing was atrocious; even he had difficulty in reading it. Every morning when he arrived at the office he looked with envy at the writing of the accountant filling unnecessary ledgers with beautiful letters; even though he thought about getting him to make a fair copy of these long and extremely private letters, he was too embarrassed to suggest it. So it took him several nights to write a letter. While the light in his room shone, his father muttered angrily remembering the electricity bills and grumbling in a loud voice, ‘If you’d had your light on that much when you went to school, you’d have become a somebody by now.’
Just as Aziz Bey feared that being so far out of sight would also be reflected in Maryam’s mind, he would receive a new letter; and strangely enough, those letters arriving from a hot and distant city did not become less frequent or shorter.
However, if Aziz Bey had paid a little more attention he would have been able to see in the answering letters, written on wafer thin pink paper with painstaking writing slanting to the left with the tails of the y’s rounded and tiny circles dotting the i’s, that these letters were based not on love but on an insatiable curiosity for what was left behind. If someone not in love read these clichéd lines taken from films and novels, he or she would have easily realised that Maryam was one of those women who took pleasure not in love itself, but in the devastation it left behind. But Aziz Bey did not understand this at all. In fact he was not altogether to blame. Just as Maryam was one of those women who took pleasure from the ruined lover she left behind, so Aziz Bey was one of those men who believed that there was no woman who would not fall in love with him. The countless women who had entered his life since his youth were the reason for his self-confidence. Of course it was impossible for Aziz Bey’s distant sweetheart to forget him.
Maryam’s letters always begun with the words, ‘your days spent without me…’ and were full of questions passionately picking at the sincere feelings of the lover she left behind. Yet there was the air of an experienced mature woman rather than that of a young girl who was forced to go far away and who was impassioned by a childish love. This sweetheart whom Aziz Bey imagined biting the top of her pen while writing letters full of innocent and inquiring questions, described in the same long letters everything about her new home, its magnificence and beauty; she wrote that even though it was very beautiful, they were, in this country as hot as hell, only able to breathe at night, that their situation was rapidly improving, and she invited Aziz Bey to this new prosperous country with very sincere sentences whose reality had not been tested.
‘You come too,’ said Maryam. ‘Without you, days drag on…’
As Aziz Bey received this heartfelt invitation he trembled, little realising these sentences looked good only on paper.
And so it was these invitations, written on pink paper that seduced him.
The expected happened at the end of a day when he was lost in thought over Maryam’s letters and postcards; he was fired. Hearing this, his father kicked him out of the house in order to knock some sense into this son whose lovelorn state had lost its charm. Actually, his intention was to leave Aziz Bey outside long enough to learn his lesson and so teach by experience just what life was all about. His own father had failed to do that, leaving his son lost in a moderate and harmonious world: and hadn’t that been the best thing to do? If he had been more of a disciplinarian, taken an interest in everything, in his son and daughter, if he had forced them to study, to grow into responsible people, would he have spent his life going to and fro between a run-down house and a run-down bureau?
The idea and the deed meant well was naïve. But what his father couldn’t have predicted was where it would lead.
His father was sitting in the coffee house playing rummy when, with still two hours until the end of the workday, Aziz Bey went sauntering past. He was still dressed up to the nines, but despite his neat and pressed clothes, there was something dishevelled in his manner and air, something flighty. He had taken off his tie and put it in his pocket. In this state that handsome youth looked like an idle child who had skipped school. He walked rolling a stone over and over with his foot as if life were just a carefree, light-hearted, merry game; he looked as though he couldn’t care less about what happened tomorrow.
His father grasped it at once. It was obvious that this was going to happen. He paled and his lips trembled. He asked the coffee house owner for a glass of water. He sipped the water down. Despite his plight he sat in the coffee house until evening, abandoned the game he was playing and thought about his son who, although a fully-grown man, was still frivolous; and this made him grow angry. He returned home at his usual time to find his son lying on the couch reading a newspaper and not looking particularly upset at being fired. He was taken aback.
He imagined that his son would stand in front of him at least a bit crestfallen, looking troubled, and find some excuse, however feeble, for being fired. He gave a little cough, bent his head and found an unaccustomed tone for his voice. He sat in his armchair in a way that was neither as harsh as usual nor as mild as not to be expected of him.
‘Why did you come home from work early?’ he asked.
Aziz Bey shook h
is shoulders indifferently while turning the page of the newspaper he was reading.
‘I was fired…’ he said.
This statement, that issued from Aziz Bey’s mouth calmly and naturally as though it were the most normal thing, immediately strained the atmosphere in the house. His father drew a deep breath and began to speak, growing angrier, with his voice rending as his anger grew. He said whatever came to his mind, whatever was on his tongue. As he shouted sentences full of insult at Aziz Bey, his mother became more anguished and looked from her son to her husband as if tongue-tied. There was an indescribable sadness in her face. At every biting word she shuddered as if she’d been punched, and shut her eyes tightly.
Aziz Bey was branded a rogue, a beggar and a good-for-nothing. Insulting sentences verging on curses reverberated round the walls of the room; yet a joy as light as an egg white that froths the more it is whisked, unexpectedly began to form inside Aziz Bey. The father, unaware of the letters calling his son to a hot country scented with a mingling of smells of spices, flowers and lemon, finally booted him out of the house. He told him that he was only fit for common brothels and the filthy streets.
‘Don’t stand there any longer soiling this decent and honourable house!’ he said, ‘Get lost!…’
At that point, his mother had covered her face with her hands. Aziz Bey quickly left the room and went to his own room. He filled the case that he had put on his bed and had looked at for days but somehow had not had the courage to fill, he, took his tambur and left. He had intended to say goodbye to his mother, but at the door he met his father.
‘Are you still here?’ said his father. ‘Haven’t you fucked off yet?’
Tears sprang to Aziz Bey’s eyes and he flushed. He looked at his father bitterly, and slammed the door with such force that the glass decorated with ironwork in a tulip design fell out with a crash. At that point, his mother, whose heart had been beating abnormally fast since the beginning of the quarrel, collapsed on the floor, no longer able to stand the burden of this disaster.
