The Aziz Bey Incident

by Ayfer Tunç

  He waited with the hope of meeting Maryam suddenly one day on an unlikely street corner and asking, ‘Why did you deceive me? Why did you beg me to come and then leave me high and dry?’ Without giving her the opportunity to answer he would say ‘Wipe mefrom your memory too.’ Yes, he lived for six months with this hope, his eyes scanning the terraces of luxury hotels, his pulse racing whenever he saw a young lady pass by with curly black hair flying about in the wind.

  Those six months were difficult to live through. Whenever he saw a policeman in the distance he changed his path, he entertained rich and capricious drunks who wished to quench their longing for their native land with music. He took his share of the tips in the copper bowl that was emptied out onto the table after everyone had left, while the lights were being turned off one by one. His hands always trembled as he took it. He was never quite satisfied, never slept soundly.

  But finally he realised that Maryam did not pass along the streets he walked all day long, that the few harsh words at the tip of his tongue had almost gone mouldy, and that the streets of Istanbul passed one by one before his eyes in the dirty bed into which he climbed as the day dawned. It was then that he decided to return.

  Winter had come. From time to time a dirty, fine, soaking rain smothered the city’s streets in mud. One night, Aziz Bey returned to his hotel after the programme, washed his hands and face and sat on his bed. He looked outside and thought for a while in this unheated, wretched hotel room. He got cold, he pulled the second-hand coat that he had bought from a street seller across his shoulders and counted the money that he had pinned to his vest. There was a strange emptiness inside him. This money would be enough for him to buy a ticket if he travelled on deck. His first job the next morning was to go and purchase that ticket.

  The following night, the programme ended, the drunks dispersed in ones and twos, and the place was tidied up. Aziz Bey sat down beside Toros, who was drinking with a sad expression at the table under the only light left on in the tavern. He filled a glass with arak.

  ‘Toros,’ he said ‘I’m going back to Istanbul now. I’ve bought a ticket, for a boat… I’m going.’

  A deep silence had fallen on the place; it was as though it were completely deserted.

  Toros looked at Aziz Bey with eyes instantly filling with tears.

  ‘To Istanbul eh?’ he said. ‘When?’

  ‘In about a week.’

  They did not speak for a while. Aziz Bey swallowed.

  ‘Thanks Toros,’ he said ‘If it hadn’t been for you, I would have died in this foreign land.’

  Toros smiled.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ he said.

  A waiter brought peeled bananas and oranges to Toros’ table. Toros filled the glasses. He sighed with a groan.

  ‘Istanbul,’ he said, ‘Istanbul. Will I see her again? Who knows?’

  Aziz Bey took his tambur and began to play. Toros started to sing with a low voice that only the two of them could hear.

  You are my flower of passion, my precious crown.

  You’ve no idea how much I love you…

  That night they did not sleep.

  On the morning of the day of the journey, Aziz Bey woke up early. Through the dirty windows of his room he looked at the city made to glisten in places by a refracted sunlight. He was sad. He knew that he would never see this city again, this place where he had learnt the bitterest lesson of his life. He recorded every little detail in his memory, he put his tambur and everything he had acquired in that city – a new shirt, a second-hand coat, a few pairs of socks, shaving set, a few singles – into a suitcase and left the hotel. He breathed in the air that had become cool but was still smelt of spices and flowers.

  Arriving at the port with Toros, they embraced under the big shadow of the ship.

  ‘You’re going to eat blue fish in Balıkpazarı, don’t forget!’ said Toros. ‘Grilled, though, all right?’

  ‘Alright,’ said Aziz Bey. ‘And for desert it I’ll eat halva for you. From Koska. With pistachio nuts.’

  As he climbed the ladder let down from the ship, Toros was wiping his eyes with the back of his hand, ‘Say hello to Istanbul!’ he yelled, ‘Greet Istanbul for me!’

  Aziz Bey leant on the rail and waved to Toros for a long time. After the deep muffled sound of a horn, the ship weighed anchor, and the tall, muscular, handsome figure of Toros slowly became smaller, until it was just a speck. Aziz Bey thought the only good thing that he retained after this strange adventure was to have left a friend in that city who wiped his eyes after bidding him farewell. He was gutted, as if carrying a heavy stone inside himself through the entire journey.

  An icy hard February snow had covered the port of Istanbul. As he walked, it crushed with a crunch under his feet. Aziz Bey stopped and bent down to the ground, took a handful of crystallised snow from the bottom of a wall and rubbed it on his face. To feel its coldness on his palms, on his skin, made his burning head feel better. He was crying. He just stood there with tearful eyes as the others disembarked from the ship: passengers reunited with their loved ones, bags and cases passed him by and went. Now there was a new life in front of him. A life unknown, pregnant with days as good as those at the beginning of the adventure or as bad as those at the end. Yet being a native of that life, he was not deterred. He just had to decide where to go.

  This void that he fallen into, this feeling of homelessness was upsetting, strange, a little bad; but not at all without hope. It was as though he knew all the people passing by around him. This cold weather, the frost, the wind that lashed like a whip; these sounds, the whistles of the steamers, the hums, the clouds; he recognised every aspect of the city. He was now among people who, if he said ‘I’m dying,’ would understand what he was saying. The heavy weight of foreignness lifted from him, he began to walk towards the first place he could, his father’s house. He walked very slowly; because he had missed his own language, he read all the signs that caught his eye with relish and inhaled the city that he had longed for so intensely. Seagulls were wheeling in the air, buses and trams passed; children selling newspapers were yelling; women with umbrellas and men with raincoats were trying to get to places in time. To him the city seemed like a loving mother prepared to take him to her bosom.

  He arrived shamefaced in front of the door that, on leaving the house, he had slammed, bringing down the frosted glass. He was ashamed of everything. He was very ashamed of having imagined he was loved and having been mistaken. He would have preferred to die if he could. Life had taught him a far greater lesson than his father had wished, had taught him a far graver lesson than he had deserved.

  Well, had Aziz Bey learnt his lesson?

  No… Aziz Bey, like many others, had preferred to grapple with, and defy life.

  His forefinger remained indecisive for a while on the bell. A strong wind was blowing; it sliced his face and the back of his neck. His body that for six months had grown accustomed to a hot climate shivered violently, partly because it did not know what it should expect. Aziz Bey overcame his indecision, even though he knew he would be rebuked, and timidly pressed the bell like an acquiescent child. He listened to the footsteps coming from inside. These weary, tired, shuffling sounds were nothing like his mother’s hurried steps.

  His father opened the door. They stared at each other for a few seconds. When Aziz Bey saw the state of his father he was dumbfounded. Before him stood an exhausted man, whose lined face showed the anticipation of death. He was skeletal. His eyes had sunken in, and his dishevelled hair and beard had become snowy white. He looked unkempt. The striped pyjamas that he was used to seeing him in only at night were filthy; a yellowing vest peeked between the half done up buttons. Aziz Bey gaped at this sorry and decrepit scene and was just about to say ‘Father…’ when hatred flashed in the still lively eyes of this corpse-like body, and his father shut the iron door in Aziz Bey’s face. He could not get his father to open that door again.

  He learnt what had happened during his a
bsence the first night that he stayed in the house of his aunt who, despite her deep fondness for him, still looked angry. He stirred and stirred a steaming bowl of paprika soup. He had no appetite. He was so afraid of what he was going to hear that he had forgotten his hunger and his tiredness, his long journey spent on the deck on a bare board, and all his pain. He just did not have the courage to ask about his mother. They were silent. The sound of the kettle boiling on the stove commanded the entire room.

  Suddenly, his aunt blurted out, ‘Your mother died. The day you left…’

  The water boiling over from the kettle dripped and sputtered on the stove. Aziz Bey felt like ice in the room where the coal stove burned red hot. He said nothing, and left the table without touching his food.

  ‘I feel very sleepy,’ he said ‘I’m tired…’

  That her nephew had not had a bite to eat did not escape his aunt’s notice; she made up a bed on the couch in the room where the stove was burning. Aziz Bey lay on the bed and buried his face in the pillow. He slept immediately. When his aunt entered the room the next day, she found Aziz Bey unconscious. He had a high fever. His breath was moist to the point of being steamy. He lay for about a month in his aunt’s house.

  Aziz Bey had always been an obstinate man, what he said went; he had never been seen to bow and scrape, beg or plead. Despite all the harshness of his character, however, he tried very hard to make peace with his father. He went to his house time after time. He rang the bell for ages; he waited with patience for the door that was shut in his face to open. Each time the net curtain of the window that looked out onto the street was parted slightly, but the door whose glass Aziz Bey had broken as he left did not open.

  And so the Aziz Bey who was the cause of the incident that occurred in Zeki’s tavern was the same Aziz Bey in whose inner being such a touching story had opened a wound that would not heal. He spent a lifetime trying to suppress the pain of that wound, to exaggerate the headstrong, even arrogant attitude in his nature, to insolently oppose the heavy blow that life had dealt at such a young age.

  In the end no one emerged on top in this tragic story.

  After his return, his life changed completely. He was never again the cheerful, irresponsible youth who revelled in love. He did not even get in touch with his old friends. Nor did he often walk around the streets where he had grown up. Didn’t whistle in the streets. Wasn’t filled with the joy of life as the day dawned. Just played the tambur until he got cramp in his wrist. Started and lost a lot of jobs. He could not stay long in the house of his aunt, who blamed him for his mother’s death. He rented a room in a boarding house in Aynalıçeşme. When he awoke each morning in that room, whose heavy damp smell permeated all his belongings and which looked out onto a dark narrow street, he thought how alone he was and went out into the street in this melancholy frame of mind.

  He was young, fairly good looking and knew how to behave and talk. Because of this he had access to many places and many jobs, but he immediately got fed up with the boorish managers and their easy-going assistants in those low-ceilinged offices; he made no attempt to learn the job they gave him, felt an overwhelming desire to go out at once into the fresh air or to return to the city’s quiet streets. He could not get used to being told off, or to taking orders. When they sent him out on an errand, he’d return in four hours instead of half an hour and make it very obvious in every way that he was waiting eagerly for work to finish. So he never lasted long in any job. He was even more headstrong and conceited than before.

  At one point, because offices, shops, depots and stores depressed and bored him, he tried his hand at manual labour. He thought that if he exhausted himself with physical work all day, he would be able to forget this strange sorrow that had enveloped his soul. He began to work on a building site. But that didn’t last very long either. The foreman tried to slap him for toppling a wheelbarrow full of bricks and in return Aziz Bey gave him a thorough working over, and quit.

  He began to frequent a tavern in Tarlabaşı. If he had the money he paid the bill, if not he had it put on tab. It was a quiet place with one or two innocuous, poor, melancholy patrons. He used to go there almost every evening and occasionally take his tambur with him. The evening of the day he beat up the foreman, he was broody. Seeing him in this state, the tavern keeper came and sat beside him.

  ‘Son,’ he said, ‘what do you keep thinking about? You’ve got a valuable skill there. My place is too small, but we can find a place that would want you.’

  That night Aziz Bey thought hard. There was good reason while he was far from home, when there was no other way to stay alive. While he was there he either had to play or die. But in his own city, in the taverns where he regarded himself a local, where he felt as if he were the landlord, to entertain drunken patrons who didn’t know how to behave, to touch the strings of this valuable musical instrument to suit their contemptible desires…

  But he realised he had no alternative. The only thing he knew how to do properly in this life was to play the tambur. And so he began playing in taverns.

  After making this very difficult decision, his luck changed for the better. Aziz Bey had been to many places before he came to Zeki’s tavern; he passed through bars, nightclubs and music halls. He even became known as Tamburî Aziz Bey; so respected was he by virtuosos and patrons alike. And so it was that during those years he felt a lot better. He frequently came to forget the blow he had received from Maryam.

  At a time when he still lived in the worst room of the pension and while he made do with food stuffed down during the programme intervals instead of a proper meal, a job offer came from a somewhat better tavern. The offer was not bad. For a start he would not have to play until the early hours of the morning, and apart from the tips collected by the drummer and clarinettist, he would have a small wage of his own. He accepted almost immediately. A hope, if only small, that everything was going to get better, kindled inside him.

  Although he never thought his father would see him again, he still went on visiting the man whose heart had turned to stone with resentment for his son. Each time the same thing happened. A few days a week he used to go to his father’s house at different times hoping to catch him unawares and ring the bell for ages. After parting the curtain and looking for a few seconds, his father would disappear again. Aziz Bey knew that this stubborn, disgruntled man was staring at him from behind the curtain. And so he’d sit in front of the pane for about half an hour, fix his eyes on the window and wait without moving; sometimes he wrote little notes on paper and stuffed them under the door.

  At times like these, his inside became as dry as a desert. He didn’t feel guilty for having left home all that time ago, but the pain of not having been able to explain it.

  That day he went to his father’s house with fresh hope. He rang the bell and then waited for that movement that he was used to seeing at the window. He was waiting for the net curtains, now gone grey because they had not been washed since his mother’s death, to part, and to see his father’s eyes for a moment and the curtain would close again.

  But although he waited for quite a while, the curtain was not parted. Aziz Bey felt as though a vein had burst in his breast and filled with blood. He smashed the window with a huge stone he picked up from the ground, then climbed inside through the window in front of which his mother had in the past arranged flowers in pots and out of which, leaning on a cushion, she anxiously watched her son playing in the street, and which had closed on the happy days as he grew up.

  His father was sitting stiff as a board in his chair, wearing the same pyjamas as always and his reading glasses, and holding a newspaper. On the table was a frying pan with some half-eaten garlic sausage and egg, and the dried end of a loaf of bread. A few garments that had been washed were hanging on a line strung across the room. He heard a song rising in murmurs from the radio that had been left on for who knew how many days.

  There is no wound as painful as the wound dealt by words.

&n
bsp; There is not a cure in the world for the wound of the heart

  A hot, dry pain flared inside. His tear ducts were burning red hot, like a riverbed dried under the sun. He was filled with a desire to stretch out his trembling hands to close the eyelids of this elderly corpse. Now there was no trace of the resentment in the eyes that until recently had looked like fire. It was as though a dulled pair of dirty marbles lay in the eye sockets of a stranger. When he touched his father’s hardened eyelids, with the reality of death he felt he had been left entirely alone on the face of the earth. He was now alone like a seed that had not fallen to its bed of earth but had stuck and dried between two pieces of stone. All this passed through his mind; yet he realised he had been waiting for such independence, and even desired it. In fact, he had never really minded his father’s lasting reproach for in all truth, it was he who never forgave his father.

  When he deserted this house he’d seen numb, defeated, spent expression in his mother’s eyes as she looked at his father, and had realised she’d been hurt irreparably. That it was not him, but his father whom his mother had not forgiven comforted him. This old man who’d spent his life blustering and thundering about must have seen that hurt face, but had chosen to foster a deep resentment instead of wasting away accepting he’d founded an entire lifetime on mistaken principles. That was the reason this picture of death before his eyes hurt Aziz Bey twice over. The house now reeked of a strong smell of damp mixed with misery left over from so many vanished emotions.

  He took his father’s suit that, so well preserved thanks to his mother’s ministrations, a pair of shoes, reading glasses and a felt hat, and gave away the rest of his father’s belongings to the neighbours.