The Sea-Crossed Fisherman

by Yashar Kemal

  At length he encountered Skipper Dumpy Osman, a friend from his old Kumkapi days. ‘Dumpy Osman! Dumpy Osman!’

  Skipper Osman stopped his engine at once. It was many years since Selim had been known to speak to anyone from Kumkapi. ‘Fisher Selim!’ he exclaimed. ‘Is that you, Fisher Selim?’

  ‘Yes, yes, Osman, it’s me. Wait!’ Fisher Selim steered his boat alongside Skipper Osman’s and jumped in. The deck was piled with dead dolphins. Fisher Selim inspected them all, one by one. ‘No,’ he muttered at last. ‘Mine’s not here.’ He ground his teeth. ‘Whoever … I’ll kill him!’

  Osman offered him a cigarette. Fisher Selim smoked it fiercely, sucking in his cheeks. Then he came out with his story, eyeing Osman suspiciously for any sign of ridicule or scorn. But Osman, a worldly-wise old fisherman, understood Selim’s feelings. He expressed his sympathy and Selim was grateful to him.

  ‘Do you know Skipper Dursun?’ Osman asked. ‘Bald Dursun, the Laz?’

  ‘Yes …’

  ‘Well, he’s been out with fifteen boats, a real plunder, and he’s piled up all those dolphins in Zargana Bay at Erdek, high as that hill there. Nine huge cauldrons he’s set up, boiling away day and night. God knows, your dolphin may be there …’

  No sooner did he hear this than Selim was in his boat and off full tilt for Erdek.

  As he entered Zargana Bay and saw the swirling smoke and caught the rank odour of fish oil, Fisher Selim felt suddenly faint. Pulling himself together, he cast anchor and rowed over rapidly to the shore. The beach was piled with dead dolphins, each with a black hole in its head. He walked over to the tallest heap, his feet crunching over the shingle. The sailors stared at him curiously as they went on slicing up the dolphins and dropping them into the soot-blackened, bubbling cauldrons under which huge logs were burning. After having carefully inspected the first heap of dolphins, Fisher Selim passed on to the second, then to another lot behind a jutting rock. Suddenly his heart beat faster, his head whirled and his eyes went black. There, only two paces in front of him, was his own dolphin. The mark on his back was growing darker and the broken wing beating faintly.

  Fisher Selim stood rooted to the spot, swaying on his feet. ‘Which is Skipper Dursun?’ he managed to ask after a while.

  A grey-bearded, hawk-nosed, goose-necked man with a slight hump came forward. ‘I am,’ he said. ‘What do you want?’

  He had hardly spoken before Fisher Selim was at his throat. The sailors rushed up, yet not one of them could prise open Selim’s vice-like grip. It was Kurdish Remzi who saved his life. The Skipper was at his last gasp, eyes bulging, lips purple, when Remzi grabbed Selim’s testicles and twisted them. Touched to the quick, Selim relaxed his hold. The sailors had a hard time dragging him away and getting him to cool down.

  ‘I’m going to kill you, Bald Dursun,’ Selim stated at last, with cold fury, ‘just as you killed my dolphin. I’m going to plug seven holes into your head. Just wait a couple of days and you’ll see what’s coming to you. So long as I live, I shan’t let my dolphin’s blood go unavenged.’

  The steely determination in his voice made Skipper Dursun’s blood run cold. ‘Get going, lads,’ he moaned, as soon as Selim had left. ‘The man’s raving mad. He’s off to get a gun and he’ll be back in no time to attack us. Either we’ll kill him and go to jail or he’ll kill us. Hurry up, we’re going straight back to the Black Sea. Damn the man and damn his fish. I’ve got a family … If we stay here in the Marmara, he’ll find us wherever we are. It’s not a man we’re running away from, it’s a maniac.’

  The oil from the cauldrons was quickly poured into barrels, the fires extinguished, the remaining dolphins stacked into the boats, and in no time they had steered clear of the bay and sailed away in the direction of the Bosphorus.

  Before dawn Fisher Selim was at Blind Mustafa’s door.

  ‘Wait,’ Mustafa called to him. ‘Let me put something on.’

  ‘I can’t wait,’ Selim said dully. ‘I want a rifle quickly, and as much ammunition as you can spare …’

  ‘Aha! I told you so, Fisher Selim, didn’t I? There’s no time to waste. All those fishermen from Kumkapi, Samatya, Bandirma, the Black Sea, all of them have been making fortunes out of dolphin oil. There’s no time to waste at all … I’ve got a German carbine that’ll shoot you every dolphin you find in the pupil of its eye …’

  ‘Bring it!’ Selim shouted.

  ‘All right, all right, I’m coming. I know, I know. You’re in a hurry. You’re afraid the others have finished all the dolphins in the Marmara Sea. But you’re so skilful you’ll get some too, whatever’s left of them. You’ll be rich too one day …’

  ‘Enough!’ Selim thundered.

  ‘I’m coming, I’m coming. Of course you must make haste. Everyone’s been hunting the dolphin for months now, while you …’

  Blind Mustafa was soon back carrying a shiny German carbine and a large bag of ammunition. ‘Here you are,’ he said. ‘You’ll pay me later, whenever you wish. I can give you some more carbines if you want. And bullets too, cases and cases …’

  ‘This’ll do,’ Selim said. ‘You’ll get your money next week.’

  ‘At your convenience … Whenever you wish …’

  The stars glittered overhead as though ranged in the sky by a magic hand when Fisher Selim arrived back at Zargana Bay, nursing the German carbine on his lap.

  The bay was deserted. A few logs were still smouldering and, at the foot of a rock a single dolphin lay stretched on the sand. Fisher Selim drew near and saw the mark on the dolphin’s back, faded and grey now. He looked and looked, then walked away. A swarm of bees that had fled at his approach returned to drone over the dead fish.

  His feet dragging, sick to death, he regained his boat, took an old blanket out of the hold, wrapped himself up in it and, laying his head on a board, fell asleep.

  The sun was quite high when he awoke, the air warm, the sea, the earth, the spring day smelling of a pleasant sunny smell that filled a man with gladness. Gentle white-crested wavelets broke on the shingle. Fisher Selim cast one last glance at his dolphin. The bees were still whirring above the dead body, very low. He set his engine going and, without another look back, steered on towards Istanbul.

  7

  Many a tale was told in Istanbul about the dead dolphin and Fisher Selim. It was the one topic of the day, retailed with a wealth of embellishment from the Bosphorus to Pendik, from Pendik to Silivri, from fisherman to fisherman, boat to boat, all over the Marmara Sea and as far up as şarköy, Gelibolu and Çanakkale.

  ‘He went mad, poor Fisher Selim, stark staring mad when they killed his dolphin.’

  ‘Poor man, poor, poor man!’

  ‘He wandered up and down the Marmara Sea, all by himself, searching for his fish …’

  ‘His beloved …’

  ‘Like one possessed …’

  ‘Enamoured of a fish!’

  ‘How can you make love to a fish?’

  ‘It has no breasts.’

  ‘It’s cold too …’

  ‘It can’t speak …’

  ‘It has no arms to embrace you …’

  ‘Yet he was in love with this dolphin.’

  ‘In the middle of the market-place in Erdek he got Skipper Dursun by the throat, the bald one who killed his fish, and he squeezed and squeezed …’

  ‘All those people in the market couldn’t drag that bald skipper from his hands!’

  ‘And when they did, he was half-dead.’

  ‘At his last gasp he was, Bald Dursun.’

  ‘Serve him right!’

  ‘What did he want with Fisher Selim’s beloved fish?’

  ‘Fisher Selim should have cut his throat.’

  ‘Gouged his eyes out …’

  ‘Skinned him alive!’

  ‘Such a beautiful fish it was, a man couldn’t help falling in love with it.’

  ‘They say that Fisher Selim would talk with it …’

  ‘The fish would come to
meet him in the early morning …’

  ‘It would jump into Fisher Selim’s boat and take up a mirror …’

  ‘Don’t spin us yarns, mate, we’re all Muslims here!’

  ‘Who’s spinning yarns, man? People have seen this as sure as I see you now.’

  ‘It must be true, or why should Selim suddenly lose his heart to a fish?’

  ‘In the old days, not now, not in these degenerate times we live in, was there a fisherman on this Marmara Sea who hadn’t seen a mermaid?’

  ‘There aren’t any now.’

  ‘How could there be?’

  ‘What business have mermaids with the likes of us now? Bastards, depraved, dissolute, base, wicked, adulterous … Hitting defenceless apprentices, trawling fish we don’t need just for the fun of it and casting whole netfuls back into the sea, dead and putrid …’

  ‘Lying, scandal-mongering …’

  ‘Betraying our closest friends …’

  ‘Scheming to destroy each other …’

  ‘Oppressing the poor …’

  ‘Laying waste the sea …’

  ‘What business have mermaids in a place like Istanbul is now?’

  ‘In a world where the underdog is always crushed …’

  ‘Fisher Selim’s quite right to shun people.’

  ‘Still, there was this one mermaid left in the Marmara Sea …’

  ‘Oh, come off it, man!’

  ‘Let your whore of a wife come off it!’

  ‘Your brothel-keeping mother …’

  ‘Well, stop telling fish tales …’

  ‘Let your pandering cuckolded fag of a father stop!’

  ‘One mermaid, one only, remained in the Marmara Sea and it was Fisher Selim who found her!’

  ‘Each morning before sunrise the mermaid would swim over from Emerald Bay at Büyükada and climb into Fisher Selim’s boat. She’d take a mirror and comb her long shimmering yellow tresses. And then …’

  ‘Then she would go into the cabin and lie on the bunk, waiting for Selim, all afire with desire, until he came to her. The mermaid was very jealous. If Selim looked at a human woman, if he so much as touched her hand, the mermaid would smell it out and she would raise such a storm on the sea that it would fare ill indeed for Selim.’

  ‘Mermaids are the most jealous of creatures …’

  ‘And that is why Fisher Selim never speaks to human beings, never.’

  ‘He had three children by that mermaid, two girls and a boy …’

  ‘They say the girls were the spitting image of their mother.’

  ‘Selim took the boy to his own family. And there the boy grew up …’

  ‘But that boy sits all day long on the shore, without food, without water, gazing far out over the sea …’

  ‘He’ll avenge his mother. He’ll kill that bald Skipper Dursun.’

  ‘No other human being’s ever coupled with a fish. Only Fisher Selim …’

  ‘Who knows what a strange, pleasing sensation it must be …?’

  ‘Look here, Selim’s not the first one …’

  ‘Ever since the time of the patriarch Noah men and fish have had intercourse with each other. Ever since the Flood mermaids have seduced the handsomest males at sea.’

  ‘Oh, come on, man, don’t talk rot!’

  ‘Don’t let me start on Selim and his dead fish-woman!’

  ‘Shame on you! It’s a sin to make fun of a man like this.’

  ‘You’ll be struck down by a spell.’

  ‘You never know who’s who in this world.’

  ‘I wonder if mermaids have monthlies like human women.’

  ‘But they have breasts, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Is it wide enough down there?’

  ‘Warm …’

  ‘Can they hug and kiss?’

  ‘Did Selim …?’

  All this talk reached Selim’s ears in the end. People made sure of that, if only to annoy him. Those who were afraid of him, who would not have dared approach him otherwise, took a malicious pleasure in making bawdy insinuations and conjectures, especially before women and girls. Fishermen are the worst scandalmongers in the world and in those days the fishing community of Kumkapi and Menekşe was no exception to the rule.

  For a long time afterwards, no one saw Fisher Selim, neither in Menekşe nor Kumkapi nor anywhere else. And finding nobody to get their teeth into, the gossips finally tired of repeating to each other every day the adventures of Selim and the mermaid.

  And when Fisher Selim returned to Menekşe with a red dolphin painted on the prow of his boat everything was forgotten and the embers had long turned to ashes.

  8

  Zeynel was waiting at the Sirkeci train terminal. His gun thrust into his belt, the very way he walked different now after his exploit, he paced up and down, erect, with stiff unbending knees, on the look-out for Hüseyin Huri and the other vagrant boys.

  Hüseyin Huri was now in his twenty-first year. Long years ago his father had gone off to work in Germany and when his mother died soon afterwards he was left on the streets. A whorehouse madam took him in and he grew up pampered by prostitutes who vied to mother him with all the repressed yearning for the children they could never have. Nothing was denied him, so it was no wonder that at the age of nine Hüseyin Huri decided to be a globe-trotter. Frontiers, passports, police stations were no obstacle to him. Footloose and fancy-free he roamed from country to country and his adventures made the headlines in the press for days on end. One day there would be a large photograph of him in Germany, standing on the boarding-ramp of an aeroplane among fur-clad ladies and men in elegant overcoats, a broad smile on his full lips, his mischievous black eyes gleaming, and the papers would set aside all other matters to speculate on how a nine-year-old urchin could have boarded that huge plane. Another day, news agencies would be sending in photographs of Hüseyin Huri in London, still smiling, and the papers would vie with each other in surmising how this miracle boy could have found his way to London. Next, he would turn up in South Africa, having travelled as a stowaway in a ship, and there would be statement after statement by the authorities about him. He became quite notorious and it so happened that many rich families felt it an interesting proposition to take him under their wing. So, now in Germany, now in Switzerland, wherever Hüseyin Huri set foot in his peregrinations, a wealthy couple would press him to stay with them and as good as adopt him. They would deck him out more splendidly than their own children and have themselves photographed in the public squares of Munich, Berlin and other well-known spots, holding the boy’s hand with a great show of affection. There was one photograph in particular, taken in the Swiss Alps, that made you wonder if this was really Hüseyin Huri or Riza Pehlevi, the son of the Shah of Iran, so alike did they look, the black eyes, the pointed head, the hair parted in the middle, the skis, the ski-suit. Even the bashfulness that lay under the cocky gaze …

  And then one fine day, Hüseyin Huri was back in Istanbul. He’d had his fill of travelling. No more Munichs, Berlins, Bonns, Genevas … Finished the Londons, Cape Towns, Cairos, Beiruts, Stockholms, Oslos, Madrids, the sleek golden mothers and chic fathers, the pearls, diamonds, furs, the heady perfumes, the pleasure cruises in luxury yachts, the Swiss Lakes, the Italian operas – yes, Hüseyin Huri had even been taken to La Scala in Milan and for the first time this gregarious child had felt ill at ease in such an assembly, all stiff as scarecrows, the hand-kissing, the waves of heat, the heavy scents mingling with foul breaths, the fluttering furs, the jewels, the strangely attired fellow on the stage with horns and long ass’s ears, bellowing and sobbing at the top of his voice, the garish colours, the spectators pretending to watch while carrying on whispered conversations with each other – all in the past, the circuses, the casinos … Hüseyin Huri had broken away and come to rest at the Sirkeci railway terminal, joining a gang of street waifs who slept wherever they could, in Gülhane Park, in the hollows of the old city ramparts, in empty railway cars, and spent their days picking poc
kets, thieving, drinking and gambling. Then one day it came to the ears of one of the stalwarts of the Democratic Party, a self-made man who had managed to acquire three factories in only six years, that Hüseyin Huri had fallen among some dissolute youths and he felt it behoved his new status to make a gesture of humanity, especially as this was the famous Hüseyin Huri who had so often held the headlines and been compared to the heir to the Iranian throne. A peremptory instruction to the police to find the boy and, no sooner said than done, the next morning the newspapers featured pictures of a tall man with pommaded hair embracing an impish ragamuffin whose bold black eyes stared straight into the camera. There were long articles on how the wealthy industrialist, Fahrettin Çoksoylu, had decided to adopt Hüseyin Huri. After that the papers and popular magazines regularly published photos of the two with captions that reflected the importance of Hüseyin Huri’s new father. And in all these photos, whether in the winter resorts of Abant and Uludag or in the warmer regions of Izmir and Adana, Hüseyin Huri was always attired in a ski-suit. The last photo of Hüseyin Huri and his new father was taken in the Alps with a tall snowy peak in the background. There was a new blonde mother too and all three wore ski-clothes. Hüseyin Huri looked somewhat crestfallen. His eyes were sad and his full lips pouting.

  Less than a month later he was back in Sirkeci for good. For a time he wandered aimlessly about the town, still in his ski-suit. Maybe he liked it. Besides, everyone recognized him in this outfit. All heads would turn to him as he strutted up and down Beyoğlu. The trouble was his new father, Fahrettin Çoksoylu, had never thought of buying him any other clothes, not even a shirt or a pair of underpants. He wore that expensive ski-suit next to his naked body. Still, it kept him warm, and when the weather grew too hot he sold it for a pretty good sum to a sports dealer.