The Sea-Crossed Fisherman

by Yashar Kemal

  There, in the middle of the sea, its engine at a stop, Fisher Selim’s boat was wheeling as if caught in a whirlpool and from the shore drifted the smell of boiling fish. A burst of gunfire made him jump. He heard a long shriek as of a child being slaughtered. Unthinkingly, he set the motor purring and headed towards the sound. After a while he found himself in a forest of fishing boats. Hundreds of guns were blasting away and the sea was red with blood. Smitten dolphins shot up into the air screeching like children, splashed down into the water and surfaced again, white belly turned up, bleeding. Some, screaming, dived out of sight only to rise a little later, white belly up, bleeding. Others tossed and turned, squalling frantically, squirting blood, then lay still, white belly up … And the fishermen, with hooks and ropes, hoisted them into the boats.

  As Fisher Selim stood there blinking, at a loss, he was hailed by one of the skippers. The voice was familiar, yet he could not make out who the man was, with that long pock-marked face and those green-streaked grey eyes. Some old comrade from his youthful flings in Kumkapi he must be; but who, looking at him so mildly, with concern, with affection even? Suddenly, behind the pock-marked face there hovered a snow-white nurse’s cap with the badge of the Red Crescent, no sooner seen than gone in a wisp of smoke. Long golden tresses, sometimes braided, spreading curtain-like over the water, and a pair of large blue eyes brimming with love, faintly glimpsed behind the curtain of hair. Fisher Selim stood staring at the bleeding dolphins, at the sea foaming with blood, at the sailors struggling with the dying animals, heard the shrieks of children being butchered, and tried to recapture some forgotten thing that eluded his mind. As the sailors hauled the dolphins on to the decks, the boats sank lower and lower into the water. The pock-marked skipper, his hands on his hips, his legs set wide apart, smiled at him. Selim smiled back. In an instant his own boat was loaded with a big pile of dolphins. He set out for Sinan village. There he borrowed a large cauldron from Mad Nuri and with the help of Nuri’s three sons he boiled the fish in the bay of Sinan village. The oily stench seeped into his very bones. He could never forget it, nor the man with the pock-marked face, though he never found out who he was. Then the long freighter flying an Italian flag, loaded with barrels. The grating of winches … And afterwards, as though in the grip of some hectic fever, the money burning his hands, Fisher Selim rushed off to lose himself in the city …

  The Fish Market, the crowds crossing the bridge, the barges on the Golden Horn, the swarms of seagulls, the masses of turbot, the cases and cases of gurnards … Gurnards flying bright red through the air from the boats on to the wet grey wharf, picked up by practised hands and stacked in neat heaps, all eyes pointing the same way … Piles and piles of fish eyes … And the seagulls, wing to wing, weaving a curtain over Süleymaniye Mosque, seething, hurtling down with mad bitter cries at each fish that was thrown. The tall slim minarets appearing and disappearing behind the mass of wings … A yellow dog stretched on the pavement, asleep, head resting on its paws … Fisher Selim’s head is burning, on fire, as he watches a crimson sun dawn between the minarets of Sultan Ahmed Mosque. The waters of the Golden Horn are thickly skimmed with dust and dirt and oil. The Golden Horn stinks. Floating on its surface are dead seagulls, driftwood, empty tins, tomatoes, green peppers, corncobs, water-melon rinds, dead fish, all swaying sluggishly, mantling the turbid muddy water.

  5

  The events of that night I only know by hearsay.

  It was well past midnight when Selim became aware of a pair of eyes at the window. Suddenly, the muzzle of a gun flamed. Six times the gun exploded before dropping to the floor. Selim had caught hold of the man’s wrist. It was Zeynel. He was struggling to free himself, writhing like a snake at the bottom of the wall, yelling, cursing, his eyes starting from their sockets. Fisher Selim screwed up his face as though some foul stench had offended his nostrils.

  ‘Go, damn you,’ he said. He switched off the light and got into bed without another look at his attacker. Yet for the first time in days, he thought about Zeynel and suddenly he felt strangely disquieted.

  Zeynel had been ten or eleven years old when he turned up in Menekşe, all alone, and took shelter with some fellow-countrymen of his. That was nine years ago. In his home, somewhere on the distant Black Sea coast – maybe up on the mountains of Rize, neither Zeynel nor his countrymen had ever once mentioned where – Zeynel had in one night witnessed the murder of all his family: his father and mother, his brothers and sisters, his uncles and their wives and children. Even Zeynel’s six-year-old brother had not been spared. Zeynel could never forget the sight of him, sitting in his bed against the wall, bathed in blood, both hands clamped to his mouth, his eyes frozen in a wide lifeless stare. Somehow, Zeynel himself had escaped without a scratch. Maybe he had been in the barn during the raid. Maybe he was a sleepwalker and had been wandering in the tea or hazelnut gardens. Or perhaps he’d gone out to make water under the plane tree and had clambered up into its branches at the sound of shooting. In the morning some neighbours found him in his bed, huddled in a ball among the gory corpses, all his limbs trembling. For days afterwards he remained coiled up, rigid, his eyes tightly closed, refusing food and drink. Try as they might, the strongest men could not prise his mouth open. When at last his teeth loosened and food was put before him, he gobbled it up like a wild animal, his eyes rolling with fear, ready to fly at any moment. Some distant relatives had taken him in, but he did not stay there more than a month, and even then he vanished during the day and only gilded in cat-like at night. He lived in dread of everything. A bird, an ant, the faintest rustle of a leaf startled him into flight. And then one day he turned up in a boat in the port of Trabzon, far from his home, huddling in the bilge water between two ribs of the hold. The sailors plied him with questions, but could not get a single word out of him, and when they tried to put him ashore he clung to a mast and all the crew together could not tear him away, short of killing him. So they gave up and set a large bowl of soup and a loaf of bread in front of him, but he would not even glance at the steaming mint-scented soup until he was sure the boat had weighed anchor and was way offshore.

  ‘Here,’ the captain tackled him, ‘take this spoon and grub up. Look, we’re as far from port as can be and I’ve no intention of going back just for you.’

  With the instinct of a wild creature Zeynel sensed that no harm would come to him from the captain. He crept up to the soup and gulped it down quietly, still casting fearful glances around like a caged beast. And so it went on until the boat came to Istanbul, the boy cleaving to a mast at every port, uttering desperate howls if anyone so much as made to touch him. In Istanbul he went straight to Menekşe, to the home of Laz Refik, a former neighbour from his home village. For six months he never stepped out of the house, and when he did it was only to run back if anyone spoke or even looked at him. Then suddenly at the age of sixteen or seventeen this timid lad turned into a veritable hellion. Wherever there was trouble, a fight, a robbery, Zeynel was sure to be there. In the space of a few years he became the worst troublemaker this side of Bakirköy.

  A crowd had gathered outside the house. Fisher Selim heard the sound of many feet and Zeynel’s voice raised above the roar of the surf. So it’s the lodos wind again, he thought.

  ‘Let me go!’ Zeynel was yelling. ‘I’m going to set fire to his house. I’ll put a bomb in it. If you love your God don’t stop me. This world has no use for the likes of him … That dog …’

  The tramp of feet and the rumble from the crowd grew louder.

  ‘Throw that dynamite, Zeynel! You’re as good as dead anyway. D’you think you’ll get off alive after what you did? Throw that dynamite, then, and rid us of a bad lot. Let go of him, you fellows …’

  Zeynel’s voice rose still higher. He was carried away by the feeling of power it gave him to swear and curse at Fisher Selim and so prove himself a real man. Fisher Selim guessed how it was and so he waited calmly in his bed for Zeynel to spend himself and go away. Yet, after a whil
e, he began to have doubts. That confounded lad was lashing himself into a frenzy. What if he did indeed have a stick of dynamite with him?

  Fisher Selim rose, switched on the light, drew on his trousers, picked up the gun from the floor and opened the door. The railway station lamps lit up the little garden which was packed with men in pyjamas or underclothes and women in nightdresses and curlers. The hubbub died down, the crowd fell away and Zeynel stood transfixed, like an owl pinned by a strong light, as Selim bore down upon him with the gun.

  ‘You fool!’ Selim said quietly. ‘Take your gun and go. You’ll have the police on you any minute.’

  Zeynel turned on his heels and fled, disappearing down the steps that led to the seashore.

  It had begun to rain, and still the crowd remained there, staring.

  ‘Get a move on, you people,’ Selim said. ‘What on earth d’you think you are going to find in my house at this hour of the night?’ And he slammed the door in their faces.

  The next day, I was down on the seashore very early. A blanket of smoke lay over the sea, so dense that not a single boat was to be seen and just the tips of the Islands and the mountains opposite emerged. There was no trace of last night’s lodos, only a warm caressing dawn breeze, bearing an odour of iodine, refreshing, invigorating, infusing you with an exhilarating sensation of being born anew, of bliss at being alive.

  Fisher Selim was already on the wooden jetty, repairing a blue fishing net. His hands moved at lightning speed and he was so absorbed that he never even heard me approaching.

  ‘Merhaba!’ I called.

  His eyes lit up when he saw me. ‘Merhaba!’ He beckoned me to his side and went on with his work.

  ‘What time is it?’ he asked after a while. ‘Must be about four, but that rooster hasn’t crowed yet.’

  ‘It won’t be long,’ I said. ‘It’s ten to four.’

  ‘I wasn’t wrong, then,’ he said. ‘When the shadow of that tree there hits this white stone at this time of the year, it’s four o’clock.’

  I stared at him, wondering whether this was some kind of joke, for I could not make out any shadow in the dawn light, but he was already gathering up the net and carrying it to his boat.

  The smoke blanket over the sea was gradually retreating.

  ‘Jump in,’ he invited me. ‘Today we’ll hunt for that bullock again. You never know but he might spring up under our very nose before we reach the clump-of-trees landmark.’

  We struck out west into the receding smoke and stopped at the clump-of-trees landmark which is between Ambarli and Çekmece, a mile and a half out from the old Menekşe weir. The sea here this morning was mauve, shading to pink and blue and purple in places, and deep down there was a long trail of purple lengthening into the open sea.

  ‘We’ll cast a net here for mullet and pick it up on our way back. Tell me, have you ever been to the Fish Market very early in the morning?’ he asked as he began to lay out the net.

  ‘Only once.’ I replied. ‘At seven o’clock.’

  ‘That won’t do,’ he said. ‘It’s at five you should go, provided you can find the market wharf under the gulls.’

  ‘The gulls?’

  ‘Yes. In the early morning they gather like a vast cloud over the wharf and the whole of the Golden Horn too. They swarm down on the incoming fishing boats for the portion that every fisherman sets apart for them. Not to do so, not to give these poor city vagrants their dole each morning at the Fish Market, brings on the worst of bad luck. It’s a well-tried thing. The fisherman who neglects to do that can’t sell his fish that day. For a long time afterwards he never catches any fish at all. Many a fisherman has seen his engine go on the blink, his oar break, his sail tear, a hole in his hull … And sometimes the boat sinks too. Yes indeed! Every creature in this world must get his due, the fish in the sea, the bird in the sky, the ant on the earth, and man, above all man …’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘man above all.’

  ‘I know,’ he said with a broad smile. ‘I know about you, why you were thrown into prison. Yes indeed …’ He raised his voice as he dropped the end of the net with its float into the water. ‘Above all man’s due. Cheat a man out of his due and sooner or later it’ll stick in your throat. Look what happened to Laz Mazhar, the commission merchant who used to bleed all us fishermen white. He took his last count at the age of twenty-seven. Yes, above all man’s due …’

  ‘It’ll stick in their throats.’

  ‘When?’ he asked wistfully.

  ‘Soon.’

  He laughed. ‘Of course. Soon. Those young people are doing something about it. One night … You remember that Laz youngster, the small one with fair hair, one of those whom they killed later? Well, I ferried him secretly to şarköy one night … Ah, they’re killing them all, one by one …’

  ‘Yes, but they won’t get away with it.’

  ‘Children of poor humble families, they are, all of them. If only I’d had a son,’ he sighed. ‘Even if they killed him … I would have gone like the others to the Gülhane Morgue to recover his body, with his comrades in thousands accompanying me …’

  ‘Didn’t you ever have any children?’ I asked.

  His blue eyes clouded. ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I never got married,’ he replied, his face softening, his hand on the tiller quite still now.

  The sound of some late-crowing cocks floated over from the shore. Way off Büyükada Island a brightly lit passenger ship was gliding by in all its glory. After a while its wake reached us and rocked the boat. Selim stirred. He looked at me, then bent his head. Quietly the words dropped from his lips into the sea. ‘But I will get married …’ His voice was so strange that my flesh crept. ‘Let’s go now,’ he went on as he started the engine. ‘We’ll pick up these nets later.’

  He didn’t say another word until we came to Kumburgaz. His eyes were scanning the sea, hawk-like. All around us tiny baby fish popped out of the water and plopped back, again and again, as though they were racing our boat.

  ‘Look,’ Selim remarked, ‘they’re running for their lives.’

  ‘Who from?’

  ‘Why, from Jumbo Dentex of course! Just look at the poor little things! Almost ready to fly in the sky to escape being gobbled up. But Jumbo Dentex is hungry too …’

  ‘Let him eat poison,’ I said indignantly. ‘As though there’s nothing else for him in the sea but these tiny baby fish.’

  ‘He just has to open his mouth and swim around,’ Fisher Selim said. ‘Masses of things for him to swallow in the sea … Like the human dentex … The world is full of food. All men could have their fill, but most of them go hungry …’

  We were sailing past the little port of Silivri, a hazy blue streak along the coast with a few lights blinking here and there, when Selim veered off towards Marmara Island. And suddenly, without warning, our boat heaved. I started up and there, only a little way ahead of us, I saw the crystal blue back of a huge fish. It flashed and vanished.

  Fisher Selim grabbed the harpoon. ‘There he is,’ he yelled. ‘Ya Allah!’

  The back of the fish flashed again. Selim waited. For the third time the fish surfaced like the gleaming curve of a wave, razor-blue. Then it was as if Selim’s body had leaped out in the wake of the harpoon and swung back. The rope went taut, only for an instant, then slackened.

  ‘Curse it!’ Selim cried. ‘He’s escaped.’

  ‘But the rope went taut. The harpoon must have pierced him …’

  ‘Just his tail. My hand wasn’t steady enough.’

  ‘Won’t he die of the wound and sink to the bottom of the sea?’

  Selim laughed. ‘Swordfish don’t die from such a small wound and the salt sea will quickly heal it. Besides, a dead fish doesn’t sink. It surfaces and the gulls and other fish devour it.’

  ‘Next time …’

  ‘Next time, I’ll get it,’ Selim vowed. ‘I know him better now. My hand won’t tremble next time. Then we’ll take
him to the Hilton.’