by Ayfer Tunç
My heart, the day has ended again with separation; the sun has set.
Shame, hope has deceived you yet another day, my heart…
The clerk was drawn towards this music, whose words he did not understand but which quietly penetrated his heart. To be able to hear better, he went upstairs and put his head round the door of Aziz Bey’s room. There was reverence and wonder on his face, but Aziz Bey who was lost in the melodies of his own music did not even notice it. The song ended and when Aziz Bey lifted his head he saw the clerk in front of him, looking at him with a broken smile. Knowing full well that the clerk did not understand, he said, ‘That’s how it is mister clerk. Look, hope has deceived me yet another day.’
All he ate that night was bread.
The next day he felt weak and spent the whole day in bed, turning first one way then the other. Towards the evening he got up and, looking at his growth of beard in the mirror whose silvering had flaked off, he thought how he must first find someone who understood his language. Wasn’t there a consulate or something in this city? At that point the clerk came. He was speaking continuously in the city’s complicated and misty language, but in a really noisy and excited way, as if trying to tell Aziz Bey something. He pointed to the tambur lying on the bed. Aziz Bey smiled, he thought the clerk wanted a song, took the tambur and sat on the bed. However, the clerk took Aziz Bey by the arm, showed him his clothes and succeeded in explaining to him with weird movements that he wanted him to follow him.
Aziz Bey got dressed in a state of bewilderment, took his tambur and followed the clerk. Dusk had fallen. It was as though the people of the city who could not go out during the day because of the heat had now flowed onto the streets and they were full of lights, alive. There was a delicately sweet fragrance in the still hot air. It was as if a sharp scent of jasmine pervaded the air from somewhere and in a funny way also gave Aziz Bey the will to live. This time he felt pleasant things filling him and his feet fairly flying along the city streets, which he had hitherto wandered in a mood of hopelessness and angst.
The clerk walked very fast, greeting everyone and making rude remarks to strange men with bohemian faces, while looking behind him from time to time to see if Aziz Bey was coming. They were progressing towards the city’s nightlife. The clerk stopped in front of a highly decorative, low door with Arabic writing in shiny letters. He pushed the door open and signalled to Aziz Bey. They went down some steep steps and came to a large area divided into sections by columns covered with mirrors. A few feeble lights lit this dark basement decorated in burgundy velvet; the nightclub that had long since sent home the clients of the night before was preparing for its new patrons.
Aziz Bey looked around; there was a lack of feeling inside him. A little later a well-built Arab, moustache and hair sparkling with brilliantine, wearing a pin-striped suit and waistcoat appeared along with a few well-fed men. Pointing here and there, he was giving some orders in a loud voice in words that were a mixture of Arabic and French. He was attentive, he was firm. When he saw the clerk his face softened. They embraced and began to talk immediately in loud voices, laughing heartily from time to time.
Aziz Bey had shrunk terribly, he had crumbled. His shoulders had fallen, his head was spinning slightly. He thought he was melting in the shadow of this huge Arab. He swayed. At that moment he felt the clerk’s hand on his shoulder. Both looked at Aziz Bey and began to speak. The clerk’s face revealed his respect for, and praise of, Aziz Bey, but at that moment Aziz Bey failed to understand this; he was too alone and estranged from everything to understand and be happy. The Arab took a cigarette from his case and lit it and his signet ring dazzled Aziz Bey for a moment. He addressed Aziz Bey with a pleasant expression on his face. He made rapid movements in the air with his large-fingered hands as if he wanted to explain something.
But Aziz Bey, a cock crowing in his own dunghill, a lion in his own neighbourhood, clever, proud, even conceited, did not understand a word of what the two men were saying. He just looked. Finally the clerk could not stand it, took the tambur and thrust it into Aziz Bey’s hands. It was then Aziz Bey under - stood that they were asking him to play. The clerk pulled up a chair, Aziz Bey sat down and began to play the tambur that had been placed between his knees.
The heart is tired now of shedding tears with your love.
Because there are no tears left in the eye, it has sobered with patience now…
He shut his eyes tightly to stop the tears falling. In spite of his hands trembling and his voice sounding tearful, the Arab smiled with pleasure and the clerk was looking at Aziz Bey with a broad, stupidly naïve smile, as if taking pride in this work of art. The song ended, the big burly Arab patted Aziz Bey on the back patronisingly, as if praising a child who had memorised his times tables well. He smiled and left saying a multitude of words to the clerk. The clerk took Aziz Bey by the hand, brought him over to a corner and seated him down, then disappeared under the gloomy lights.
Aziz Bey was alone, helpless and melancholy. He was tearful. His hand, still grasping the tambur tightly, was sweaty. He was such a stranger to everything, he could not find even a tiny clue to help him understand his state. He could not even think of a face-saving interpretation to enable him to sit up straight on the burgundy velvet chair. His face was as sad as a child who had lost his mother in a crowd and was waiting for her to find him. No doubt if he had seen this childish, tearful, deprived expression, that pitiful state would never have been erased from his memory, and his relatively short life would have been even more brief. But luckily there was not enough light for him to see himself in the broken mirrors that covered the columns from top to toe.
A little later, a waiter left a tray on the coffee table in front of him. Two round flat loaves, a few meatballs and a little green salad. Aziz Bey did not even consider it an offering made out of pity for a poor stranger. Yet although he was fainting with hunger, he ate the food unhurriedly, ridding his mind of any thought of pride. A few hours later, the lights of this vulgar place glitz brightened, and the tables began to fill up. Aziz Bey was lost in contemplation of these sweaty, noisy men of this baking hot land, happy in their own world.
While he was watching them swallowing the drink they had poured into small glasses, watching their smiles, their hearty laughter, and their constant embracing of their long haired, tired women with greasy-looking complexions, he heard a sentence right in his ear.
‘You are the one from Turkey?’
He started. A slim, handsome young man with a very thin moustache stood smiling in front of him. They were about the same age. While Aziz Bey was searching his mind for an explanation for this scene the young man had already drawn up a chair and sat next to him.
‘So a tambur? And one with a bow too.’
An excited delight appeared on Aziz Bey’s face. The deepened, hardened lines that had formed, and resembled a dried corpse in the desert, softened and he smiled.
‘With a bow…’ he said ‘Left by my grandfather…’
The eyes of the Armenian filled as he put out his hand and touched the tambur. He looked at Aziz Bey. It was as if he was not looking at a poor foreigner far from his homeland, but at a souvenir of Istanbul. An inappeasable longing appeared on his face.
‘What part of Istanbul are you from?’ he asked.
‘From Samatya. Do you know it?’
‘Don’t I just? It’s near our place. I’m from Kumkapı… My name’s Toros.’
With these words that fatal foreignness in Aziz Bey blew away and vanished like cigarette smoke slowly escaping from an open window; he relaxed. It was not as if they were seeing each other for the first time, but were two childhood friends that had grown up in the same street.
The sweat-bathed musicians had taken a break from enter -taining the merrily sizzled patrons in that complicated language with its strange intonation and unaccustomed melody. Now, there was a loud hum all around. While the Arab boss wandered among the customers with an attentive look, the waiters
carried mezes and drinks on large trays to the tables, from which bursts of laughter, belches, misty guttural words, startling shouts mingled together, and a careless vibrancy carried on heedlessly. Aziz Bey and Toros – who’d fled from Turkey for a crime he had committed six years earlier – stared at and talked to each other non-stop, in a mood in complete contrast to the others. At that moment, homesickness had bound them together, as though making them blood brothers. They had a feeling of humiliated partnership brought about by having walked the same streets, boarded the same trains, cat-called at the same girls, and sworn with the same words.
‘Are they still eating blue fish?’ asked Toros. ‘It’s been six years since I’ve tasted an Istanbul blue fish.’
That night, Aziz Bey started to play in the tavern of Toros from Istanbul, where Armenians who had emigrated from Turkey regularly went, occasionally bringing with them large bosomed, long-legged, pale-skinned Arab Christian girls in low-cut dresses, young enough to be called children. It was poorer and less showy than the Arab’s tavern. But it was tremendously exciting. The patrons attacked Aziz Bey’s music like a glass of water.
Even if the music in the tavern awoke in Aziz Bey’s soul a state to be pitied, a feeling of being an orphaned child; singing songs about Istanbul reinforced the longing he felt for the city and increased his desire to stay alive and return to his country. There came a moment when he forgot that there were thousands of kilometres between him and his beloved city and when he went outside he thought that he would find himself in the rough cobbled streets of Samatya, where a strong sea wind blowing would carry the smell of seaweed to his nostrils and if he listened carefully to the silence of the city he would hear small ripples beating very softly against the shore.
*
Many years later, after Aziz Bey had really become Aziz Bey, one night when he was alone, he had sat down and made an account of his life, and written about the first night he played in Toros’ tavern in both columns. Toros was the only person in Aziz Bey’s life to whom he felt both great gratitude and whom he would have preferred never to have met. It was Toros who had appeared suddenly in front of him just at a moment when all his hopes were exhausted, had prevented Aziz Bey from falling from the threshold of misery into the darkness of non-existence.
Yet it was the offer made that night by the same Toros that marked the route he was to take for the rest of his life. It was still the same Toros who was the instigator of his taking the step into this unappreciative, ungrateful, disloyal profession, entertaining drunks whose souls changed like their faces as the bottles emptied. Drunks who did not know how to behave, but went on crying, shouting, vomiting, laughing or becoming aggressive. This way, he became content with whatever tips this noisy, worthless gang felt like giving, turning music into a plaything in the hands of drunks, making it louder from time to time to increase the euphoric atmosphere and like a beggar expect something in return for this strange entertainment.
This feeling of inferiority created by this job had so hardened Aziz Bey that for the rest of his life, even in the most important moments when he should have been compliant, modest, or humble, he had always failed. If asked, he’d deny that this superior, obstinate manner ever hurt him.
Until that tragic incident that took place in Zeki’s tavern.
Every night for roughly six months, at a quarter to ten, he got onto a fairly high stage, sat on a wooden chair, placed his tambur between his knees and opened the night with a taqsim overture. At daybreak, he got up from his wooden chair and on his way back to the hotel he counted backwards the number of days still to go; not 99, 98, 97…, but 1, 2, 5, 56, 73, 144… He was counting an unknown number of days. He knew both the east and the west of this city that was yet to be divided either in people’s minds or on the map. He saw too that this city’s weather could become cooler, and that its cats ate from rummaging in the rubbish bins. He got used to its cooking. While looking out of the window of the disintegrating hotel, absorbed with the washing hanging from the balconies of the multi-storied apartments, he kept thinking of his own streets.
A few days a week he went to the port. He looked for a ship where he could again pay his passage, where there were people who understood his language; but he could not find one. Almost every time he went down to the port he learnt that a Turkish ship had weighed anchor either a few hours or a few days before. He began to believe that his destiny would end in this hot city where he sensed the smell of the desert behind the mountains on his skin. As he took each sip of arak he missed the full-bodied rakı that satisfied his palate. He wrote a few letters to his mother and father, but never received a reply. He was tired of playing and singing the same songs. He deciphered many words of that complicated language mingled with Arabic, French, Armenian and Turkish. During his first days of work, when, as he played the taqsim overture, a few enraptured music lovers would generously and ostentatiously leave bank notes in a copper pot that stood immediately in front of the stage, he felt the blood that was flowing through his veins rush to his head, and his face flush. Later he got used to this feeling. He gradually hardened as if frozen.
It was already the third or fourth week since he had begun working. He lost track of time in this tavern where gigantic fans hung from the ceiling and where electric fans dotted here and there turned without ceasing; where trays were delivered seventy types of mezes on tables set with an eye for showiness. He would not keep track of time because he kept mixing up the days, and he forgot the number that he had counted of days to go; every night he started counting again. Towards evening, he got up from the sleep that had knocked him out at dawn. He washed his hands and face and sat for a while on his bed. There was still a lot of time before going to work. He was in the convalescent period of his love sickness, trying to forget his hurt, his great mistake. This hell city that he had fallen right in the middle of by, his own fault, had embraced him in spite of this. He felt a strange gratitude towards the city; he felt that if he left one day he would leave a piece of his heart here. He wanted to go out of the hotel whose clerk he had become close friends with, with whom he even played backgammon from time to time, pass through the streets whose ins and outs he had learnt, and walk along the magnificent wide roads lined with giant palms and luxury hotels.
His clothes were falling apart and he had lost weight. The old Aziz Bey, wouldn’t have dreamt of leaving the house if he couldn’t find a tie to match his shirt; he’d toss aside his trousers if they hadn’t been ironed with a double crease, and his handkerchief starched. It would never have occurred to the old Aziz Bey that he one day he would wander upmarket roads in wrinkled trousers and a faded shirt, tieless, handkerchief-less, with drooping shoulders and dull eyes, like poor children watching garden cinemas from the top of the wall…
In actual fact, he did notice how shabby he’d become, not that he cared. He had accepted this sorry state as being a necessity of foreignness. Knowing that all he suffered was part of the act of survival made him feel better, and he hoped one day he would return to his own city and be delivered from this sorry state. He walked very slowly in the shadow of the high, smart buildings, his eyes searching the sea as if looking for a ship that would take him away. The costly beauties of the city dazzled his eyes.
An expensive convertible drove past him, and stopped in front of one of the luxury hotels. A young man dressed in spotless white and a young girl with curly black hair got out. Aziz Bey thought for a moment his heart would stop beating. He went weak at the knees and leant against the wall. He looked carefully at the girl as the couple walked into the hotel with easy, carefree steps. Then he shut his eyes.
‘Thank God…’
Despite having the same hair, the same air, the same style even, the girl was not Maryam. He sank to the ground and stayed for a while with his head in his hands. He was shaken by the possibility of seeing Maryam in such a smart car with such a pompous, confident, handsome young man; Maryam who, after drawing him to her like a poisonous spider, had reneged on a
ll the promises made in fancy sentences in letters of pink paper, ridiculed all his hopes relating to the future. This scene that ran before his eyes engraved in his mind the bitter truth that Maryam had left him quietly and carelessly. This time he understood for certain that for Maryam all this had been a sweet daydream that never needed to come true. He decided to erase from his mind that unfaithful sweetheart with the black hair that flew hither and thither in the wind.
But it wasn’t to be. Despite dedicating all the years of the rest of his life to forgetting Maryam, and striving to overcome the distress in his soul caused by her indifference and disloyalty, he failed. His heart ached like a wounded place that would not heal, letting a thin trickle of blood flow from time to time. This wound sometimes became an ache, sinking inwards, and sometimes became an anger that overflowed. He never saw Maryam again, he never once came across a trace of her; he never heard a word about her. Yet he couldn’t forget her. Maryam always existed next to him like a doppelgänger. She was like revenge yet to be taken, a lover with whom to be reunited, a never-ending longing; she was an overflowing mixture of all feelings at once. But Maryam had no inkling about any of this.
True, he never managed to save enough money for the train, or find a ship to take him back home, as soon as possible, because in the end his heart wasn’t truly in it.
If he had really wanted to, he could have slipped a couple of piasters into the hand of the walrus-moustachioed official sitting in the shade at the port smoking a shisha, once he’d learnt a little of that language shouted on the streets, and boarded a ship. He could have looked out on his dear city’s faded but beautiful silhouette when he looked from the deck on a warm autumn day. There was a reason for his looking at the employee smoking a shisha and moving away, for his somehow not wanting to go. He had hidden this reason in the most secluded corner of his heart and mind; he even denied it at times when he was on his own.
