“I have to get going,” he said, standing up.
Doug looked him up and down. There was no animosity in his eyes. There was no expression at all. As if he wasn’t thinking. He didn’t say a word.
Nedim glanced furtively toward the bar. Lalla and Gaby were still perched on their stools, chatting calmly with Gisèle, the barman, and the last customer. Nedim didn’t exist for them anymore. He only existed for Doug.
Doug seized him by the neck with his big hand and squeezed. Nedim felt himself being lifted until his eyes were level with Doug’s and only the tips of his toes touched the floor. He couldn’t breathe. He suddenly felt hot. He wanted to vomit.
“So what are we going to do?” Doug asked, without raising his voice.
Doug’s fingers were still around his neck. They were as hard as his eyes. Nedim could feel the pressure of the thumb and index finger under his jaw. All Doug’s strength and violence seemed to be concentrated there, in that pressure. He felt hot again. His back was soaked with sweat.
“What are we going to do, huh?”
“Let go of me,” he managed to say.
“Let go of him!”
It was an order. Doug looked at Gisèle and relaxed his grip. Nedim’s feet touched the floor again. He massaged his neck, and tried to get his breath back.
“What’s the name of your tub?” Gisèle asked.
Nedim’s eyes met Lalla’s. She had turned slightly to face them. He was ashamed of himself. For being so pathetic.
“The Aldebaran. A freighter.”
“Doug will keep your passport. And your bag. You can come back for it later, tomorrow if you like. But you come back with the money you owe. O.K., asshole? Now, throw this piece of shit out.”
“My bag . . .”
Alma sublime para las almas
Que te comprendan, fiel como yo
The last words he heard. They weren’t the worst.
7.
SUNSHINE AFTER RAIN, BUT NEVER WITHOUT TEARS
Nedim woke with a start. He had no idea what time it was. His watch had broken when he fell. He stretched, half-heartedly. He didn’t feel up to anything. He looked around him and felt nothing but self-disgust. He closed his eyes again.
He had come back through the Vieux-Port, on the town-hall side. Walking very fast at first, then more slowly, with his hands in his pockets. Because there was no hurry anymore. The clock on the tower of the Accoules church said five-thirty. Pedrag must have been long gone. He had lit a cigarette and cursed them all. Pedrag was a dickhead. Lalla and Gaby were bitches. Gisèle was a whore. The big black guy in the Habana was a son of a bitch. He cursed the whole world. He was talking aloud, almost shouting. Assholes! Assholes! Assholes! All assholes! It brought tears to his eyes.
It was some days now since Nedim had come to an acceptance that he was going home. He’d told Ousbene all about it. Sailing wasn’t really for him, he knew that now. He wasn’t a sailor, he was a peasant. He missed the land. He missed his village, his house. The cypress trees along the edge of the garden. The hills he could see from his bedroom window. The stream he could hear flowing beyond the kitchen door. And at the top end of the village, his fiancée, Aysel. The girl his father had gone to ask for in marriage on his behalf, when he had come back from the Army. “My son,” he’d said to him, “you’re the right age to start a family. Has your heart chosen?”
It wasn’t Nedim’s heart that had chosen, it was his body. His whole body. Aysel was the most beautiful girl in the village. Or in any of the neighboring villages. She was sixteen. All the boys had watched her grow up and blossom. They all dreamed about her. His childhood friend Osman should have married her. But Osman had died, crushed by a tree, the fool. And Nedim was the oldest boy in the village still to be unmarried. Aysel was his by right.
It was because of her that everything had taken a tragic turn. For him, and for his family. Aysel’s father, Emine, didn’t want to give his daughter to a boy without a job.
“I know you and I respect you,” he had answered his father. “Your family and your ancestors, too. I know Nedim is a good boy. He’ll be a good husband and a good father. The dowry you’re offering is perfectly acceptable, Salih. But Aysel is still young, and Nedim isn’t working. I promise my daughter for your son. Come to see me again when he’s earning a living.”
Emine had paused, then added, “One more thing, Salih. I don’t want Nedim to take my daughter abroad. As most of our children do. It leads to nothing but death.”
Nedim had lost his temper with Emine, and his father and mother too. What gave them the right to treat the son of Salih the blacksmith, the son of Master Salih, that way?
He had desired Aysel ever since he’d come back to the village. She was beautiful, yes, but above all she was pure. Her body, her heart, her thoughts. You could see it in her eyes. She wasn’t like the girls he’d met in Istanbul. Dressed like European girls, in miniskirts or jeans, chain-smoking. Girls whose one thought was to get laid. Whores.
Whores. They’d been his life in the four years since he’d left home. The reason he’d left was because his father had sided with Emine. But he didn’t regret it. He’d fucked girls of all colors. All as beautiful as each other. Probably more beautiful than Aysel. But none of them had that light that Aysel had in her eyes. They fucked, and he fucked them. Without any emotion. On empty.
Emine had given him three years. The first two years, he had thought about Aysel constantly, being married to Aysel, Aysel’s body, Aysel belonging to him and only him. It kept him busy on all his crossings. The sea took on a new meaning. Aysel’s love. Every time they put in at a port, he’d send money to his family. Almost everything he’d earned. He kept just enough to get drunk and have a girl for the night. Alcohol and women weren’t expensive, once you were outside Europe. In Saigon, he had found a girl for a week. For only ten dollars. It had been the most beautiful experience of his life. Her name was Huong. She did everything he asked of her. For ten dollars. She’d even have an orgasm when they fucked. And wash his clothes, too.
One day he’d returned to the village in an old French Army truck he’d bought in Istanbul. “That’s what I’ll do,” he’d said, “I’ll be a haulage contractor.” He still remembered his arrival in the village. The poplars along the road, the bridge, the hill, the village street. He was a hero. On the way, he’d picked up the people coming home from the fields. Then he’d gone to Emine’s house, to show Aysel the truck. “I’ll take you in this to see the sea. The Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara. Our two seas, Aysel. With the Bosphorus in the middle.” She’d had tears in her eyes. A child’s tears. And Nedim had told himself he’d soon be happy.
Before he left, he’d entrusted the truck to his elder brother, Aymur, and asked him to maintain it until he got back. He still had six months to go. He’d be crossing the Atlantic. Putting in at Panama. He didn’t want to miss Panama. He’d heard it was a paradise for sailors. That was something he had to treat himself to before he said goodbye to life as a single man. A night with the women of Panama.
But Aymur had wanted to show off. On Sunday morning, he had set off in the truck for the gorges of Bilecik, with his wife and three children, his parents, and Aysel and her parents. He was drunk, as usual. He had gone off the road at a bend. The truck had crashed into a rock on the right-hand side of the road. His father had been killed instantaneously, crushed to death. Nedim had received a letter informing him when he was in Panama. The others had been only slightly injured. Broken arms or legs. Broken ribs. Aysel, fortunately, had gotten away with a few bumps. As for the truck, it was beyond repair, and had been left on the road. Emine is giving you one more year, his mother had written in her letter, but he wants you to give up the idea of driving a truck.
To hell with Emine, he’d thought. And he’d cursed his brother and all his fucking descendants. He had spent the night drinking and dancing. Blowing his money, i
n hundred-dollar bills. The money he’d set aside for returning home, for starting his life with Aysel. Since then, he had been back to the village three times. The first time, he had fought with Aymur. The second time, he had quarreled with Emine. The last time, before he’d set off for La Spezia to catch the ship for Marseilles, he had taken Aysel to the river bank and fucked her.
She had begged him not to. She had struggled. And when he had entered her, she had wept. He had fucked her roughly, angry at the wasted years, the years he’d controlled his desire for her. All the time he had been on top of her, taking his pleasure, she had kept reciting prayers. “Elhamdüllillâh rabbilâlemîn irrahmân irrahîm, mâliki yevmiddîn . . .” He had never known such excitement. Aysel’s body, so beautiful, so pure. Her tears. Her prayers. “God be praised!” he had murmured, after coming.
Aysel had hidden her face in her hands, still weeping. Slowly, he had taken her by the wrists and forced her to look at him.
“You’re mine now. Do you know that, Aysel? You’re mine. I’m going to tell your father. I took what was due to me. Don’t feel sorry about it, Aysel, because I love you.”
Aysel had wept even more, and Nedim had fucked her a second time. Ignoring her pain, ignoring the blood trickling down her thigh. Because she was his now, she was his woman now.
He had left that very evening. Back to sea. Without a word to anyone, leaving it to Aysel to tell her father about her shame.
The day before yesterday, he’d called his mother from a public booth.
“Are you coming back for good?”
“Yes, for good.”
There was a long silence.
“It’s been a rough winter,” she said. “The trees suffered from the cold.”
“Even our mulberry tree?”
“No. But it’s like me, it’s not feeling so good.”
“Stop that, mother! You’ll live to be a hundred.”
“It’s not that, son. Emine hasn’t forgiven you.”
“I don’t need his forgiveness. Aysel is mine. I’m going to marry her whether he likes it or not. And we’ll live as we want to.”
Pedrag had waited half an hour for him, he learned from a Spanish truck driver when he got to J4.
“For the same price, I’ll take you to Amsterdam,” the Spaniard said. “I’m leaving in twenty minutes. I just need to sort out the paperwork.”
“Fuck Amsterdam!”
The Spaniard laughed. The sun was rising over the city. The storm, he said, had been terrible. He’d never seen anything like it. The ochre tower of the Fort Saint-Jean was bathed in pink light. But no one in the parking lot paid any attention. “All that beauty, all that life wasted,” Nedim thought.
A hooker got out of a red Ford Fiesta. There was a sticker on the rear window that said Proud to be a Marseillais. She came toward Nedim and asked him for a cigarette. Thanks to the storm, she hadn’t had a single customer. She offered to give him a blow job for a hundred francs.
Nedim laughed. “If I had a hundred francs, sweetheart, I’d take a taxi and get back to my ship.”
“I’ll take you if you like.”
She drove him to gate 3A of the dry docks, parking by a warehouse belonging to the Marseilles Naval Repair Company.
“Could I have another cigarette?”
They looked at each other. She wasn’t all that young. She could have been thirty, or fifty. Life had worn her out. A lined face. Flabby cheeks. A droopy chin.
“Here you go,” he said, handing her three cigarettes. “Part of my fortune.”
“If you like, we can have a quickie.”
He got out of the car and stepped into a puddle. “Shit!”
She laughed. A laugh that didn’t bear any relation to her face. A teenager’s laugh. She seemed ten years younger. He leaned toward her and kissed her on the lips.
“Thanks,” he said.
“I’m still at J4. Come see me.”
At Gate 3A, things got complicated. Nedim didn’t have his entry card for the harbor. He told the watchman he’d lost his bag, his money, but he refused to let him in. He was a young guy who didn’t want to get into trouble. He had to stick to the rules. There’d been too many robberies on the waterfront lately. Nedim couldn’t stand it anymore. All he wanted was to sleep. To forget. To forget everything that had happened during the night. To forget Lalla’s body, Gaby’s fucking smile. To forget Pedrag, the road to Istanbul. To forget his village, the path leading there. To forget Aysel. Aysel. Anger welled in him again. Anger and hatred.
“The Aldebaran!” Nedim screamed. “The Aldebaran, dammit! That fucking boat over there! Just turn around, dammit! I’m not going to jump on you!”
The watchman twisted his head to look at the sea wall. Not that he needed to. He knew the Aldebaran, of course.
“Do you see it? Over there? That big heap of old iron.”
“Yes.”
“You’ve heard of it, dammit!”
“I heard the crew all left.”
“Right. They all left. Last night. And I’d also be far away from here by now if I hadn’t run into a bit of trouble. Fucking city! I have to see the captain. He’s still there.”
The watchman looked at his register. “What’s his name?”
“The captain?”
“Of course, the captain. Not his dog.”
“Abdul Aziz.”
The watchman finally gave in. He was sick to the back teeth with Nedim. He wanted to go back to his nap, the lazy bastard.
“Do you want to go with me?” Nedim asked.
“That’s all right.” He wrote Nedim’s name in the register. “But you have to come back with the captain. And if you stay on board, we’ll give you a new card. If you don’t have a card, there’s no way you’ll get in the next time.”
“Go fuck yourself!”
Nedim strode across the quay, and passed between the docks to get to the sea wall. He was running on empty now. There were no other thoughts in his head. He did not even spare a glance for the sea in front of him. Blue, like the sky. A bright, limpid, immaculate sky. Washed clean by the storm. It was going to be a beautiful day. The first day of summer.
As he fell asleep, he thought of the hooker he had met. For the first time in his life he’d been offered a free fuck, and he’d turned it down. How dumb could you be?
Her face haunted his sleep. A mixture of disgust and desire. He was hot. Too hot. The girl was stifling him. He didn’t want her lips on his cock. He struggled. The cabin was flooded with sunlight.
He woke with a start, bathed in sweat. And with a hard-on. The first thing that crossed his mind, even before looking at his watch, was a poem his father liked reciting. In his gentle, indulgent voice.
On the road of exile we found each other again
Who could say when death will trap us.
According to his watch, it was five o’clock. Five o’clock? The glass was cracked. Shit, the watch must be broken. He lit a cigarette, his last but one, and coughed. What time was it really? Was it still morning? Or already afternoon? There was no sound on board the Aldebaran. Where was Abdul Aziz? How would he react when he found him here? What would he say?
To hell with you, he muttered.
Exhausted, he collapsed back on the bunk and closed his eyes and thought about Aysel. “Elhamdüllillâh rabbilâlemîn irrahmân irrahîm, mâliki yevmiddîn . . .” He had a hard-on again.
“Amen,” he said.
He fell asleep with tears running down his cheeks.
8.
SOME ACTS ARE IRREPARABLE
What had happened with Cephea? Abdul Aziz had tried to understand, without much success. She was crazy, that was the only answer he could find. While admitting that it wasn’t much of an explanation. In fact, it didn’t explain anything.
It was the second day after he’d gotten back
from Adelaide. Cephea had just put the children to bed. They had sat down on the terrace, to have a couple of margaritas. Cephea had a knack for making margaritas, always putting just the right amount of salt around the rim of the glass. Looking out over the roofs of Dakar in the still of the night, he started talking about the journey. It was something he always needed to do. To tell her about the world.
The Kananga had sailed up the Gulf of St. Vincent and moored in the sheltered outer harbor of North Haven. “A place where no one ever went of his own free will,” as sailors liked to say.
Beyond this strip of flat, steaming scrub, bristling with sheet-metal huts, was Port Adelaide, with Adelaide behind it. Port Adelaide consisted of a temple, a church, three bars, a hotel, a brothel, the town hall, a post office, and about a hundred houses. A sailors’ town. Further still was Taperoo Beach, where, according to Radar, their Swedish radio operator, “young girls from good families lived as recluses, and you could fuck them for free, if you knew how to go about it.”
Abdul had laughed as he quoted these words.
“Girls from good families. All sailors dream about that. Everyone has a story about a girl from a good family somewhere in the world.”
“Uh-huh . . .” Cephea had said.
He had sensed a weariness in that “Uh-huh.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m tired.”
And she had gone off to bed without finishing her beer, leaving him alone with his margarita and his travel stories. He took a swig of the beer, but didn’t enjoy it. Cephea’s absence hurt him. Whenever he came home, he liked to feel that she was close to him. She and the children. To convince himself that he was a man like any other, a father like any other. That he had a family, and this family represented his only roots in this world.
The journey this time, for the Hamburg-Süd line, had been a particularly long one. La Spezia, Fos-sur-Mer, Barcelona, Piraeus, the Suez Canal, Djeddah, Port Elizabeth, Sydney. He had written to Cephea every day. All through their married life, they had written to each other daily when he was at sea. It was his way of keeping her in his heart. Mostly, he would write to her about his love, his desires. His fantasies, too. Freely, without holding anything back. He never talked about his life at sea, the ports they put in at. He kept that for when he came home. For those evenings on the terrace drinking margaritas.
The Lost Sailors Page 6
