The Sea-Crossed Fisherman

by Yashar Kemal

  4

  Excitement kept me awake that night. To think that Fisher Selim had actually invited me on to his boat!

  The sea was only just paling when I left the house. In my garden the judas-tree, in full flower, shed a bright pink glow into the foredawn. A soft breeze, smelling warmly of the sea, wafted up to me as I walked to the shore. Fisher Selim was sitting in his boat by the wooden jetty. His huge shadow fell over the pale water and even from a distance the red sash he always wore gleamed in the blue starlight. He had drawn a green skullcap over his curly reddish-brown hair and when he saw me his face, his whole body, was suffused with pleasure. It was a profound gladness coming from the depths of his heart, such as I had not met with on these shores. The corners of his eyes crinkled as he smiled at me and I thought, now here is what we call friendship, love, fervour, if ever these things exist. But the next instant, as though he regretted having let himself go, he closed up again. The wrinkles on his brow deepened and his face grew grave. Still, his moustache quivered and he could not quite hide his pleasure as he grasped the oars.

  ‘Jump in,’ he cried.

  He rowed out into the open. Then gently, with infinite care, he put up the oars, grasped the cord with his strong long-fingered hands and fired the engine.

  We were heading for Hayirsiz Island, raising white waves on the smooth waters. The star-traceried sky shed a pale radiance over the sea and over the blue, smoke-veiled mountains on the opposite shore. We stopped off the island. The sea was calm. There was no swell, no sound from its bottomless depths. Yet, inert as it was, it impressed you as even more massive than usual, heavy as the earth … On an early morning such as this, all the world still pale, the stars fading in the sky, evanescent wisps of vapour rising slowly from the unruffled surface of the water, the sea seems to come into its own, displaying more than ever its vast unbounded might.

  I shrank from saying anything to Fisher Selim. It was as though, in the stillness of this wide expanse, an infinite weight was upon us and we were both loath to spoil something, afraid to startle the sea out of its profound slumber.

  In the distance, sunk in shadow, its leaden domes, its minarets and buildings only vaguely discernible in the bluish haze, Istanbul was still asleep, its face hidden from the world. In a little while the city would awaken, with its buses, cars, horsecarts, its ships, steam launches, fishing boats, its hamals sweating under their loads of heaped crates, its streets and avenues overflowing, its apartment buildings, mosques, bridges, all surging, interlocking in a furious turmoil and, pressing through the tangle of traffic, wondering how this city could still move, was not entirely paralysed, people would be making superhuman efforts to reach their destination. Fish-vendors in their boats by the waterfront would be setting up their gear, lighting their coals or butane cookers, heating the oil into which they would drop the flour-coated fish, and soon the odour of fried fish would spread through the early-morning air right up to Karaköy Square, to the Flower Market and to the fruit-trading wharf. Hungry workers, tramps who had nowhere to sleep but had somehow got hold of a little money, carousers with a hangover, drowsy young streetwalkers, homeless children who subsisted by picking pockets, sneak-thieving or selling black-market cigarettes would line up in front of the bobbing boats to buy a slice of bluefish, a quarter of tuna, three or four pickerel or scad, sandwiched in a half-loaf of bread, and devour it hungrily, the fat dripping down their chins. And the dull heavy roar of the awakening city would reach us from across the sea, and gradually the domes and minarets, and also the ugly apartment buildings so out of keeping with the city, would emerge from the haze, and like a strange giant creature Istanbul would spread itself out in the light of day, down to its age-old battlements along the seashore.

  Fisher Selim’s curious gaze drew me out of my reverie. I turned to him, but he rose quickly, set the motor going again and moved to the tiller. In the distance a large white passenger ship, all its lights ablaze, its whiteness blending into the white of the sea, was sailing by. Fisher Selim’s face lit up as his eyes followed the ship and he smiled, an irrepressible smile, as a primitive savage might have smiled for joy.

  As we were skirting the little island of Sedef, east of Büyükada, he rose and, shielding his eyes with his huge hand, scanned the sea all around. A few seagulls were swirling off the shore of Pendik. Fisher Selim’s face was growing longer and longer. Finally, he came to a stop in front of Tavşan Island and his arms dropped despondently to his sides.

  Suddenly I had to speak.

  ‘It was here,’ I said, pointing to Tavşan Island. ‘Here that …’

  ‘Well?’ he prompted, and I realized he welcomed this diversion.

  ‘It’s nothing really,’ I mumbled. ‘Only that, once, we’d gone fishing over there … That’s all.’

  He saw that I had changed my mind about what I was going to say. ‘You can tell me,’ he said. ‘I believe what’s true.’

  ‘Well, the truth is I caught a swordfish here once with a fishhook line.’

  ‘Really?’ He gave me a curious look.

  ‘Yes, we weighed it and it came to fourteen kilos. I was with the engineer Mehmet Bey in his boat.’

  ‘I believe you,’ he smiled. ‘But how?’

  ‘How? First, I’d come up with about two dozen red sea-bream and I was doing very well when the next thing I knew the line went very heavy. I pulled and pulled …’

  He was quite interested now.

  ‘But nothing happened. The fish wouldn’t come. “Give him some line,” Mehmet Bey advised me. But the more I gave, the faster the fish went.’

  ‘That’s how it always is.’

  ‘And then I had no more line to give. It was taut to snapping-point like the string of a violin. It frightened me …’

  ‘Row on after him.’

  ‘That’s what we did,’ I said. ‘All the way from here to there. Then he must have tired, for I felt the line slacken. I pulled very slowly and he came. The line tightened again. I let go a little. And so it went on until, suddenly, I realized that he was coming up smoothly now. He was quite near the boat when he surfaced. Only for an instant, but I never saw such a blue in my life. His back, I mean, velvety blue, the blue of window-panes in the twilight. It flashed and was gone.’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘I gave him some line again.’

  Fisher Selim’s face clouded and a frown contracted his brow. I had to wind up my story quickly.

  ‘Well, anyway, this went on for three hours until he tired and I got him. It’s true … Doctor Ibo was there in another boat and his wife, Beco, and her brother Muzaffer too … Fourteen kilos he weighed. A small swordfish … Out of the water its blue began to turn grey, then dulled entirely. The line had got tangled round his long upper jaw …’

  ‘It’s a month now I’ve been after him,’ Fisher Selim muttered. ‘He’s a sly one, very quick. I’ve seen him. More than three metres long, he is. Three times I missed him, but I’ll bag him yet. And then … A kilo of swordfish is worth a hundred and fifty lira. I’ll take him straight to the Hilton Hotel, and if they won’t pay the price I’ll go to the Sheraton. Vehbi Bey has a hotel too, the Divan. He’s very rich, Vehbi Koç, the richest man in Turkey. Wouldn’t he buy my fish?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘What’s seven thousand lira to him, after all?’ His eyes were on me, questioning.

  ‘Indeed, what?’

  ‘I’ll catch that fish. And when I’ve sold it, then …’

  ‘What’ll you do then, Fisher Selim?’

  He only smiled, his white teeth gleaming, like a child with a precious secret.

  ‘There was a time,’ he went on, ‘when this Marmara Sea teemed with swordfish, each one three, four metres long, weighing as much as six hundred kilos sometimes. But now all those fishermen, gentleman anglers, harpooners, dynamiters have killed them all off!’ He was thoroughly launched now. Beware of those silent people. Once started, given a fair field, there’s no stopping them. ‘And the same
goes for dolphins too … Dolphins who were the fisherman’s best friend, his companion on the sea … I had a dolphin friend once. He would smell me out whenever I was putting out to sea, whether from the Bosphorus or Pendik, or from Ambarli or the Islands, and together with his family he would come over and accompany my old hulk all the way to wherever I was going, prancing, dancing, singing as he went. I knew him by his eyes that looked at me just like a human being’s, by the scar on his back, by the tom end of his right fin. Yes, as God’s my witness, he would jump for joy when he saw me, two metres up in the air, and plunge back, and in another instant he would reappear with his whole family whirling merrily round about my boat, his head popping out now and then to look at me. He’d speak to me too. Not me, he would!’

  I could not help smiling. He didn’t mind.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, pleased with himself. ‘I sometimes talk to people too!’

  It was a long-lasting friendship, this, between the dolphins and Fisher Selim. Like one family they were, sharing joys and sorrows. The dolphins would laugh out loud when they saw him. An animal laugh? Laughter, tears, the prerogatives of humankind? Hah, what fools men are! It is human beings who have forgotten how to laugh. It is human beings who are lonely, friendless, who cannot, will never ever enjoy the touch of a warm hand, the beauty of a loving gaze. It is human beings who are cynical, callous, indifferent to the beauty of the world around them, incapable of feeling the pure joy of being alive, of seeing the sky under which they live, the earth over which they walk, just blind wanderers in the midst of the majesty of nature. Dolphins, fishes, birds, foxes, wolves, even the smallest insects are those who enjoy our world to the full.

  ‘The times we live in,’ Fisher Selim sighed, ‘an animal’s far happier than we are.’

  Nobody had ever loved Fisher Selim like this huge three-metre-long dolphin, not his mother, nor his father, not the comrades by whose side he had fought in the war, not his brothers, not the fellow-fishermen whose lives he had saved, only one other person, just one … Just let the dolphin not see Fisher Selim’s boat for a few days … He would go mad, turning the vast Marmara Sea inside out, dashing at lightning speed from Yalova to the Bosphorus, from the Bosphorus to the Gulf of Saros, with all his family at his tail, frantic, grieving. He would approach every boat in sight, enquiring for his friend Fisher Selim, searching among the craft along the shore, tirelessly, ceaselessly. And the fishermen would come to Selim and say: ‘He was beating about the sea again today, your pet, hey, Fisher Selim, looking for you!’ And Fisher Selim, his heart swelling with love and pride, would think that there was some beauty, some hope left in being human.

  On days of high wind and storm, the dolphin knew that Fisher Selim could not put out, so he would go on his way calmly after the small fry that he swallowed in shoals at one mouthful. Yet Selim was sure that even on such days, even if he did not show it, the dolphin pined for him. And didn’t Selim pine too? He longed for the storm to abate, and after long days of separation, when at last the dolphin spotted Selim’s boat, he would come tearing from afar, swishing up into the air every hundred metres, his joy radiating through the water to all the creatures of the sea, the fish and lobsters, the shrimps and crabs, and to the gulls too and the shearwaters and egrets. Round and round the boat he would swirl, then stop and gaze with bright adoring eyes at his friend.

  ‘Don’t call him an animal,’ Selim said. ‘Without words we’d talk and make up for lost time. He would tell me how worried he’d been, how he’d asked after me from all the fishermen and sailors he came across. And I would scold him for venturing so near the shore and explain how wrong it was, that one day these men would do him a bad turn. He’d promise never again to do such a dangerous thing. But I knew he couldn’t resist, poor thing. Fish folk, once they get attached to you, are more faithful, more devoted than any human friend. Sometimes people would see us like this, facing each other, the dolphin and me, he in the sea, I in my boat, talking to each other, and they’d twit me: “Hey, Selim, what are you doing, sitting there with that fish in front of you?” They thought I was crazy. I’d take no notice of their gibes, but sometimes they’d provoke me into answering … “Doing? Doing! Are you blind, can’t you see we’re talking?” They’d burst out laughing and shout to each other: “Just look, folks, just see our Fisher Selim chatting with a fish when he won’t talk with his own kind …” Fools, all of them! But what happened afterwards …’

  He fell silent, pulled the cord quickly to set the engine running and headed west. As we came to Hayirsiz Island the sun dawned, a red orange rind above the island, mantling the pale clouds and edging them with fire. The white sea around us slowly turned blue, its shadows deepened and the reflections of the island and of the boat took shape. In the distance the blue darkened to purple and the far-off coastline grew grey. Long streaks and patches of blue, mauve, green and red chequered the sea. And for a fleeting instant a stream of light skimmed over the surface of the water in a lightning flurry, hardly seen, only sensed, a phantom of light, a shade, an illusion, transparent, invisible …

  Fisher Selim jumped to his feet. ‘Look, look!’ he cried. ‘Did you see it?’

  ‘What’s that?’ I said.

  ‘A weird light. It always comes at this time. As though it had never been … A light a man can see only with his blood.’

  I gave him a quizzical look.

  ‘But it’s true,’ he said. ‘So many things happen like that in this world, movement, light, night, darkness, clouds, colour … Things a man can’t see with his eyes, only with his blood, so tenuous … People don’t believe me, they say I’m crazy. So I don’t speak to them any more.’

  ‘I understand,’ I said quickly. ‘I saw the light, but only just.’

  ‘Of course you did,’ he laughed, his wrinkled face opening up, relaxed now, all coppery in the sunlight. ‘I knew it. Only just today, a little more tomorrow, and more and more, and in another year or two you’ll blend with the light. It’ll fill you with joy, set the blood tingling in your veins.’

  Fisher Selim stretched out his arms as if to embrace the whole sea, then let them fall. ‘Look what a chatterbox I can be if I find someone who understands me. Would they believe you in Menekşe if you were to tell them how I’ve been rattling on? Would they now, even if you swore on the Holy Koran?’

  ‘They wouldn’t.’

  ‘Sure they wouldn’t!’ Then he looked at me hesitantly. ‘And you,’ he said, ‘you write books, don’t you?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I’ve seen them,’ he said, pleased. ‘With a horse on the cover, orange on one, blue on the other, and with the rider holding a gun and the horse going at a spanking gallop …’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘I wrote those books.’

  He smiled shyly. ‘How could you find so many words?’

  ‘There are no end of things to write about in this world.’

  ‘True,’ he said thoughtfully.

  ‘Look at the sea here, teeming with life, the sky, the rumbling city over there, look at you, look at me.’

  ‘Look at me …’ He sighed. ‘Still another day gone without my finding him.’

  ‘Maybe someone else got him.’

  He blanched. ‘Impossible,’ he cried. ‘There’s no man left in these parts who can hunt swordfish. No one. And that’s a good thing. I need that fish. Very badly. No one but I must catch it.’

  He stood up, measuring something with his hands and mumbling to himself as he scanned the coast, the islands, the headlands. Then his face cleared. ‘All right,’ he said, and we started off again, this time towards the city, the engine throbbing so hard that the whole boat shook and shuddered as though it would smash itself to pieces. When we stopped at last off Zeytinburnu, Fisher Selim’s face was businesslike again, with no trace of that soft childish wonder of a while ago. He took some hooks out of a tin box and fastened them to the lines.

  ‘See if you can find the right depth,’ he said to me.

 
; ‘I’ll find it.’

  ‘Red mullet it is.’

  ‘I know.’

  He gave me another of those curious looks.

  ‘Lame Hasan …,’ I began.

  ‘Did you go fishing with him?’

  ‘A few times.’

  ‘He’s the best fisher for red mullet in the world. Those huge-eyed little rascals even talk to him!’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘They wouldn’t even so much as say hello to me, but I know their hiding-places and I catch them all the same.’

  As he let his line down I watched him closely to see how many fathoms he would give. But his long arms had already speeded up and the line was coiling up again at the bottom of the boat while he leaned over, alert, his eyes on the water. Then I saw a red shape floating up to the surface. The bait was now level with the eyes of the mullet that flashed around it, incredibly red. In an instant Selim, extending his left hand, scooped it up expertly and threw it into the boat. Without another look at the madly floundering fish, but with manifest pride, he let the bait down again.

  And so it went on till evening, his arms working machine-like and the boat filling up with red mullet, while I, in all this time, caught only three. Fisher Selim must have marked this particular spot long ago, after many trials, and kept it a secret too. No fisherman will ever reveal his special lairs and, anyway, very few go after the red mullet. Perhaps because it is difficult to catch. The red mullet swims in bottom waters and nests among rocks and weeds. A man must be familiar with every inch of the seabed to catch it.

  The sun was setting when Fisher Selim stood up and stretched himself, a handsome figure of a man with his bushy moustache and pure blue eyes. A fresh evening breeze was rippling the smooth water, and the sun, a soft roseate mauve, sat on the horizon under a welter of clouds, orange, purple, green. ‘Well, let’s go,’ he said, starting the engine.

  The sun set and we were plunged into a blue radiance, an incredibly beautiful velvety blue in which the sky, the sea, the air all merged together. Overhead, shining white against the blue, a flight of gulls accompanied us as we headed back for Menekşe. The lights of the city stretched in a long bright line from Sarayburnu to Ambarli.