The Sea-Crossed Fisherman

by Yashar Kemal

  He could obtain a Mauser from Blind Mustafa, who had nine brand-new ones from Germany in his shanty house. And couldn’t he engage Kurdish Cemil? Here, Cemil, take this rifle and shoot us some dolphins … Throw a coin into the air and he’ll hit it every time … Then there’s Laz Murat, the one they call the Algerian because he went fishing right up to the coast of Algeria. And what about Muharrem, the buffalo-drover? What about him for hacking up those human-eyed dolphins and setting them to boil? Why shouldn’t Fisher Selim, too, hunt dolphins like everyone else? Those other fishermen, they didn’t kill the beautiful creatures for sport, did they? All seafaring people love the dolphin. He is their boon companion, a delight to the eye on the solitary desolate seas. Doesn’t every fisherman, every skipper, know that the dolphin drives the smaller fish in towards the coast, stirring them out of their nests, making it easy to catch them? Doesn’t he know that with the dolphins gone the seas will dry up?

  That night, in his house at Menekşe, Fisher Selim did not sleep a wink and at the crack of dawn he was at Blind Mustafa’s door.

  Mustafa could not believe his eyes. Fisher Selim! Visiting him! ‘Welcome, Fisher Selim, welcome! Sit down and let me offer you a cup of our poor coffee … Woman,’ he called, ‘bring out some chairs and a table. Look who’s here.’

  ‘Who?’ the woman called back indifferently.

  ‘Fisher Selim!’

  At this she appeared in the doorway. ‘Fisher Selim?’ she cried, astonished.

  ‘Himself,’ Blind Mustafa laughed. ‘Fisher Selim himself come to visit us!’

  His wife hurriedly carried out a couple of chairs and a little table. They sat down while she went in to prepare the coffee. For a while they did not talk. Selim was growing more and more uncomfortable.

  ‘I’m going to do it too,’ he blurted out at last. ‘I … I … Dolphins …’ His voice was strangled.

  ‘So you’re going out hunting the dolphin, eh? Well done!’ Blind Mustafa congratulated him. ‘Why, everyone’s doing it! They say that all these fishermen are rich as Harun al-Rashid now. There’s no end to the fish of the sea.’

  ‘But there is!’ Fisher Selim shouted. ‘Such an end that there won’t be a tiny wrasse left and all those Harun al-Rashids will die of hunger.’

  ‘I wish I could buy a boat and go fishing too,’ Blind Mustafa went on, ‘but I’ve never been out to sea in my life, much less gone fishing. You know those German rifles of mine I hadn’t been able to sell all these years? Well, yesterday a man came and bought the whole lot, ammunition and all. And he gave me so much money for them, five, six times what I was going to ask. “Agha,” I said, “I hope that it’s not a war that’s been proclaimed …” The man laughed. “A war it is,” he said, “a war between the Marmara fishermen and the dolphins. And I’m joining this war with ten boats. All my fortune I’ve put into it, sold my land too.” Look, Selim, brother, if it’s one of those German rifles you want, money’s no problem. I’ll give you one. I’ve still got one carbine left, brand-new. Why, I’d give you a thousand rifles to take away if I had them, I would. For a man like you it’s nothing.’

  The lines on Fisher Selim’s brow deepened and his face darkened. His hands were trembling.

  ‘Look, Selim, brother, don’t you worry about the money. I’d do anything for you. That man said you can get rich in six months hunting dolphins. “Once we’ve finished with the Marmara,” he said, “there’s always the Black Sea. The world’s full of seas …”’

  At that moment a warm aroma of coffee spread through the fresh morning air and the woman came up to them, her hazel eyes gleaming, her cheeks glowing, swinging her hips and carrying on a silver tray the coffee in old-fashioned red-striped cups without handles.

  ‘Here you are, Selim Agha,’ she said. ‘Welcome to our house.’

  With quivering hands Selim took the cup, spilling some of the coffee into the saucer. Quickly, he lifted the cup to his lips and swallowed the whole lot at one go. Then he leaped to his feet, mumbling, ‘Thank you, thank you,’ and walked swiftly down the slope and on to the snore. He was sweating profusely.

  Next he burst into the coffee-house, shouting, ‘I’m going to hunt the dolphin too. I’m going to bore black holes in their heads with greasy bullets. They’ll cry out like babies, they’ll weep … Let them weep …’

  ‘You should have done it long ago,’ Süleyman said.

  ‘Other people have been earning bankfuls of money all this time,’ one-armed Zühtü complained.

  ‘Only our Menekşe fishermen have stood idly by,’ said Rüstem the pedlar.

  ‘Don’t talk like that,’ Laz Hamdi admonished him. ‘Which of us has a rifle to hunt them with? Or cauldrons, or for that matter a boat large enough?’

  ‘Let Fisher Selim go,’ they said.

  ‘I will! I’ll kill all the dolphins in the Marmara Sea,’ Selim said vindictively. He ground his teeth. ‘The sea will be red with their blood.’

  Suddenly he rushed out of the coffee-house like a madman, gasping for air. The minute he was gone, they started deriding him.

  ‘Go, then, you lazy good-for-nothing! As if there are any dolphins left by now …’

  ‘Well, I never!’ young Özkan cried. ‘Fisher Selim talking to us!’

  ‘He’ll talk twenty to the dozen when he’s in a tight spot, he will, the stuck-up fool,’ Süleyman hissed spitefully. ‘What is he anyway that he won’t speak to us? Only a common fisher!’

  ‘Thinks he’s a king, that one,’ Zühtü chimed in. ‘Giving himself airs as though he was lord of all creation.’

  ‘But now that he’s in a fix …’

  ‘Now that others have snapped up all the fish in the Marmara Sea …’

  ‘Now that he’s missed the boat …’

  ‘He comes babbling to us about shooting dolphins!’

  ‘That man who never deigned to look at us!’

  ‘But Fisher Selim always does what he says,’ Özkan protested.

  ‘That he does,’ some others upheld him.

  ‘You’ll see how he’ll catch heaps of dolphins and sell barrels of oil to those foreign tankers and build himself a palace right here in Menekşe.’

  ‘Go on!’

  ‘Yes, he will. He’s going to make a paradise of Menekşe.’

  Suddenly the crash of breaking glass filled the coffee-house as slim-waisted glasses full of hot tea were flung at Özkan. The large window-pane behind him smashed down over his head and he was spattered with glass splinters, tea and blood. With difficulty two men dragged him out of the coffee-house cursing madly. ‘Bastards, rats, jellyfish! Call yourselves fishermen? Just you watch Fisher Selim, how he’s going to catch all the fish in the Marmara. And all the dolphins too. You’ll see, you low-down jealous dogs …’

  The two men who held him, Bomber Kemal and Swanky Vedat, were trying to stop his mouth to keep the quarrel from spreading further, when they caught sight of Fisher Selim at the door of Fevzi’s restaurant. ‘Shhh, look who’s coming,’ they warned Özkan, who sobered up on the spot.

  ‘Let go of me,’ he whispered. Fisher Selim scanned him from a distance, then swung angrily towards the coffee-house and stopped in the doorway. The men inside froze as his steely blue gaze, huge now, transfixed them. Suddenly, he turned away in disgust and strode off towards Çekmece.

  First he went to the kebap restaurant which Çakaloğlu had established after being thrown out of his job some months before. This man, young as he was, had been arrested because he had formed a trade union and incited the workers to strike. He had stood fast under the most terrible tortures during his interrogation by the police at the notorious Sansaryan Han. Fisher Selim did not know what took him to the restaurant, for he barely had more than a nodding acquaintance with him. The trade unionist greeted him warmly. He showed him to a table and ordered coffee for him.

  Fisher Selim started speaking even before he had sat down. ‘I’ve got myself a rifle from Blind Mustafa,’ he said. ‘Brand-new …’

  ‘He’s g
ot plenty, that one,’ the trade unionist interrupted him. ‘Those Laz fishing boats smuggle weapons in to him all the time and he squares the transaction with the police. Don’t let yourself be deceived by that shanty-house he lives in, nor by his bland ways. He’s from Antep, the head of a large contraband network. There’s no counting the men he’s killed or had killed. He was the most notorious border smuggler in all the provinces of Urfa, Mardin, Diyarbakir and Antep. But the smugglers fell out with each other and began fighting to kill, so he sought safety in Istanbul. His name’s not Mustafa at all, but some much more well-known name …’

  Fisher Selim listened with only half an ear while Çakaloğlu recounted Blind Mustafa’s exploits, how he was buying up land and property all over the country, how he already owned six apartment buildings in Istanbul itself. Suddenly, he looked the trade unionist straight in the eye and shouted: ‘I’m going to buy still more carbines from him. I’m going to hunt the dolphin, and kill and kill until there are no more left. The Marmara Sea will turn red with their blood, red, frothing …’

  The trade unionist was smiling. ‘You’re not a man to kill dolphins,’ he said calmly. ‘It’s not everyone can do that.’

  ‘I will! I will …’

  ‘You are Fisher Selim,’ Çakaloğlu said softly. ‘You’d kill yourself before you killed a single dolphin.’

  ‘Then I’ll kill myself. But first I’ll kill my own family of dolphins, one by one. First I’ll hack my own family to pieces and boil them in cauldrons. Then all the other dolphins, all of them …. Then I’ll kill myself, kill, kill …’

  ‘Oh come on, Fisher Selim,’ the trade unionist implored. ‘Stop this. What’s come over you?’

  Fisher Selim sprang to his feet. The coffee brought in by a waiter stood untouched and cold on the table. He ran out and burst into the coffee-house next door. ‘I’ll kill them,’ he began, ‘first my own family, then all the other dolphins in the sea, and then myself too …’ Frantic, beside himself, he wandered all over Çekmece like a living lament, and when he had exhausted all the restaurants and coffee-houses there, he jumped into a taxi and made for the Çiçekpazari, the so-called Flower Market up in Beyoğlu.

  The closed market smelled of flowers, of fermenting beer, of shrimp and crabs and fish and lobster. On a table in the centre a mound of shrimps, small lobsters and crayfish shone bright red under the glare of the bare electric bulbs. Barrels serving as tables crowded the market. There were beer glasses and plates of fish on them and people sat drinking and eating all around them. At the entrance the kokoreç-vendors had set up their stalls and were busily swivelling the skewers of their broilers in a swirl of fumes, their hands working machine-like, slicing the roasted kokoreç, sprinkling it with parsley, onion and tomato and inserting it into sliced loaves of bread which they handed out to customers without even lifting their heads. The odour of burnt kokoreç fat filled the whole market and even permeated the beer and fish, the white cheese and the almonds which, blanched yellow and piled on trays, were carried around by small boys or old men who themselves looked like small boys.

  Selim plunged into the tumult and found himself seated with some men at a barrel, drinking first beer then raki. Did he know them, were they friends of his? He simply could not remember. All he knew was that they listened to him all ears, with an occasional encouraging word: ‘Kill them, kill them. Don’t let a single one escape alive. Get rich and come here and get drunk with us. Here’s to you …’

  The swarming market was spinning around him, the naked bulbs, the odours, the flowers … The sea too, and blood and slow-creeping lobsters … Golden glittering lights, motor cars, voices, kokoreç fumes, street sellers, car horns, reeling drunks, oaths and curses and vomiting, half-naked huge-eyed women in the show-windows, fish-stands with rows of swordfish and sturgeon, clusters of green salads, the Cumhuriyet Restaurant, fruit-stands, oranges, tangerines, apples, and again all along the street displays of fish, gleaming, and bunches of parsley, green peppers, and dangling in the windows of butchers’ shops pheasants, quails, golden orioles, woodcocks, hares with gashed necks, turkeys, chickens, and overflowing out of the street right up to the British Embassy and down to Tarlabaşi Avenue barrows of vegetables and fruit and piles of melons and water-melons, some sliced open for display, bright red, yellow, musk-melons, one of which alone was enough to drown Beyoğlu in its fragrance … All spinning round and round … And Lambo’s tavern … Lambo’s smiling face, his wise tolerant eyes, the way he holds the glass as he hands a customer his drink, a little tighter and the glass will be crushed, yet polite, gentle, everyone’s friend … ‘It won’t do,’ he was saying, ‘you’ll never forgive yourself if you do this, Fisher Selim. I know you, my friend, I know you can do it, but you’ll kill yourself afterwards. All right, you’ll get rich, And then? You’re much better off as you are …’ Dimly Fisher Selim sensed that this gentle, earnest man was right, but he could only mutter over and over again: ‘I’ll kill them, I will, all the dolphins …’

  Up and down Beyoğlu he wandered, reeling, bumping into people, and came again to the Flower Market. It was less crowded. A man was playing the accordion. A group of fishermen friends from the old days was there. They jumped at his neck, made him sit at their table and plied him with drink. He drank whatever was put before him, babbling away unconsciously all the time. ‘I’m going to make the Marmara a barren sea. I’m going to sever its life-giving artery, drain it of all its blood. I’ll tear out its heart, its lungs. I’ll twist its balls so it never spawns again, so it doesn’t even smell like the sea any more.’

  Suddenly he got up, lunged at the accordionist and yanked him by the collar into the centre of the market. The Laz vendor there hurriedly pulled his stall of shellfish out of the way.

  ‘Let go of me,’ the accordionist cried. ‘It’s a lezginka you want of me, isn’t it? Let go and I’ll play it for you.’ He was delighted to see Fisher Selim again. ‘Such a lezginka I’ll play tonight, the very paving stones of Beyoğlu will rise up and dance with you!’

  ‘I want no one tonight,’ Selim yelled. ‘Tonight all the seas will die.’

  People made way as Selim threw himself into the dance, faster and faster, lost in a trance. The market began to fill up again. One or two people joined in the dance. Then others … More and more …

  Eminönü Square, Ahirkapi, Kumkapi, Narlikapi, Topkapi, Bakirköy … The sea, the stars, the moon, the sun, roads, trees, Çamlica Hill, the Princes Islands, lights and clouds and boats, a loud voice, the reflection of tall minarets on the water, of Süleymaniye Mosque, of the Valide Mosque, of the oil-trading wharf, Azapkapi Mosque, Sultan Ahmed Mosque, Topkapi Fountain … The leaden domes wavering in the haze, seabirds, swallows, street lamps, vagabonds … All helter-skelter, slithering over the sea, gliding on a greasy tightrope … Lambo’s voice, a little hurt, ‘Don’t, don’t do it, Fisher Selim …’ White clouds flowing over the city, white seagulls on the red-tiled roofs … Laz fishing scows coming into port, yellow, blue, green, orange, crowding side by side in front of the Fish Market at Azapkapi, mermaids carved on their prows, or huge-petalled roses, or dolphins, a bearded man on a dolphin, the Prophet Jonah … Millions of glittering fish scales … Lights, winds, stars, minarets, the stinking Golden Horn … Pell-mell. Stars in the Golden Horn … Its fetid waters bright with stars, gleaming with the green, red, blue reflections of neon lamps, the Golden Horn, a long, very deep, dark well … A great stormwind is shaking the Süleymaniye Mosque, the bridges, Rüstem Paşa Mosque … A raging sea, thundering, sweeping away Topkapi Palace, Sarayburnu, uprooting the plane trees from Gülhane Park, sweeping them on, a dishevelled mass, the whole park sliding into the sea, the flowers, the trees … Thousands of seagulls screeching, clamouring, thousands. Soaring up into the sky, swooping back over the sea, dripping with blood … Red, blood-red gulls, and dolphins … Dolphins raising foam, minaret-high, blood-red foam, shrieking … Screaming gulls, screaming dolphins, blood-red, all in a jumble in the churning sea, red breakers stai
ning the shore … And, pouring from the blood-red sky, red frothing blood, dolphins scattering blood … All blood-red … Dark.

  Up above Menekşe railway station, Fisher Selim had propped a little mirror in a cleft of the plane tree in front of Yahya’s restaurant and was shaving in the half-light of the stars. He was going to put out to sea. Yet he was afraid. What if he never came across his family again?

  He finished shaving and went down to his boat. Steering along the little stream, he got off at Çekmece and bought five cans of diesel oil and a dozen loaves of bread. He had three good harpoons in the boat, and his fishing lines and nets were stacked in the hold under the prow. Then he made back downstream and out to sea, heading for Silivri, but even before he got there he encountered a Laz fishing boat and caught sight of the dolphins heaped on the deck, their blood flowing like a fountain. The boat must have met with a whole school of dolphins and now they were being taken to that little creek near Ambarli to be hacked up and boiled. Fisher Selim averted his eyes.

  All day long he wandered about the Marmara Sea. Perhaps the dolphins had taken flight and sought safety in the depths of the sea … Dolphins are canny creatures. Why shouldn’t they be able to think of that? At Eregli, Fisher Selim turned back. His head was numb. Only flitting images were rushing through his mind. Electric lights, ships, minarets, a queer poisonous green, a saffron yellow, the Flower Market, lustrous red lobsters, fumes and odours, and a sea illuminated from deep deep down, the sun shining upwards from its far depths, irradiating the waters, everything crystal-clear, turbot lying over the sandy bottom, their noduled backs spangled, their shadows hitting the surface of the water, red mullet casting bright-red reflections up above, red coruscating scorpion fish, combers, pickerel, humble scads, swarming crabs, long-bodied dusky perch, John Dorys, translucent green, mackerel, their backs all a-shimmer, the loveliest of blues, speckled tuna, flashing cerulean swordfish, jellyfish, red and white bream, oysters, sea urchins, all moving in the surge and swell, whirling in a thousand and one vortexes, changing shape and colour from one moment to the next, growing brighter and brighter, drowning the sky in a flood of light, houses at the bottom of the sea, all alight, cars, trams, pale green and yellow, creaking along, and people swarming, scrambling over one another, Süleymaniye Mosque, Haghia Sophia, Topkapi Palace, the subway, and Beyoğlu, reeking of ammonia, of beer, of sour fermenting unbaked bread, the corpse of a dog, bloated, its blood streaking the asphalt, a vast forest under the sea, orange leaves, and dolphins, hundreds of them, their great white bodies clinging to the trees, rocking in a flood of light, then hurling themselves down one after another, their fins held low, spraying sparks high into the sky, spuming light as they fall and shatter in a steely blue radiance. Raindrops, blood-drops, roll over the blue radiance, and flowers of blood ripple in the cold wind … From deep down under the sea, from its farthest depths, the sun is dawning. Ships and boats, large and small, are caught in a maelstrom, spinning, churning in smoke, funnels, sails, masts, cranes, whirling whirling … Cracking, breaking, pitching into each other … The sea in a cataract like blue ice-cubes … The sea tossed up like blue sand … A great storm of blue swirling, splintering, blustering …