The Sea-Crossed Fisherman

by Yashar Kemal

Dursun Kemal cast about for some excuse that might earn him forgiveness. ‘It’s my mum … She said to me …’ He faltered and decided to tell the truth. ‘There’s such a flow of bonito just now … The sea’s crawling with fish … Fish …’ He stopped short, his hands arrested. Then, dropping the stamp on the blue cloth, he streaked out of the shop, down Mahmutpaşa slope, knocking into people, bringing down invectives on his head, until he came to the landing-stage under the bridge and stopped, transfixed at the sight of Zeynel, still there, leaning against the parapet, the fishing line hanging from his hand into the water.

  ‘Zeynel Abi …’

  Zeynel looked up. ‘Where have you been, Dursun Kemal?’ he said calmly. ‘It’s nearly evening.’ At his feet were four large green basins with bonitos swimming in them.

  Dursun Kemal stared at him in awe. ‘Did you catch all these?’

  ‘There’s such a lot of fish today,’ Zeynel said. ‘I tied the line to the parapet here while I nipped off to buy three more basins and when I returned that large bonito was hooked on it.’

  Dursun Kemal whistled. ‘Well, what do you know! What a marvellous fisherman you are, Zeynel Abi …’

  ‘Never mind that now. Go and sell some of these bonitos. What are we to do with all this fish …?’

  With difficulty Dursun Kemal carried three of the basins to the end of the bridge near the Kadiköy landing-place. He was back in no time waving a wad of money. ‘I sold the lot to a fishmonger, Abi.’

  ‘Then, put that money into your pocket.’

  ‘Abi,’ Dursun Kemal said pleadingly as he stuffed the money into the inside pocket of his jacket, ‘let’s go now.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Home. Mum’s going to cook a stew for you … And look, this place is crawling with policemen. Let’s get out fast.’

  ‘Let me catch another fish first. To make a seven.’

  Dursun Kemal tugged at his sleeve. ‘Six is quite enough, Abi. Look … The police … If they recognize you … That one there, that man … And that other one, they’re all policemen.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I know them all. The plainclothesmen …’

  ‘Don’t worry.’

  ‘But I’m hungry …’ Dursun Kemal hung his head piteously.

  Zeynel drew in the line with yet another blue-backed fish. Then they gathered up the tackle, stacked the basins into each other with the fish in the top one and made for the street to wait for a dolmuş to take them to Beşiktaş. All the cars seemed to be going elsewhere and it was half an hour before they piled into one, with the driver breathing fire and fury at the slowness of the traffic and chain-smoking all the way. Getting off at Beşiktaş, they hurried up the steep Serencebey slope and came to a rickety little wooden house with soot-blackened boards coming loose in places and with pink, blue and red ivy geraniums hanging from its windows. It was in a side alley so narrow that doors and windows almost touched each other.

  ‘Mum! Mum!’ Dursun Kemal had started to shout as soon as they had turned into the alley.

  A white-kerchiefed head poked out of a window. ‘Huuu …’

  ‘Look, look, look!’ Dursun Kemal held up the basins as he ran, while all the neighbours clustered at their windows. ‘Look at all this fish Zeynel Abi’s caught with my line, Mum! I caught some too, but he’s a real crack fisherman. The fish came up as fast as he cast for it …’

  ‘Come in, Zeynel brother,’ the woman said, greeting him like an old friend. ‘You’re very welcome, I’m sure.’

  ‘Mum, you’ll cook him one of your fish stews, now, won’t you, Mum? I said to Zeynel Abi that he’ll eat his fingers too with it, he will …’ The boy prattled on excitedly while his mother replied: ‘Yes … Of course … How nice … Certainly.’ She was a woman of dazzling beauty, with coal-black eyes, a clear golden complexion and full breasts and hips.

  At their windows the neighbours, all eyes, were commenting to each other with secret signs on the visit of this fair-haired stranger. The woman promptly shut the door in their faces. This little alley was like one house, like one room even. Everyone knew everything about everyone else, what they did, what they ate and drank, how many times a night or week they made love, who had a lover, who went to the brothel, who made money by devious means, who sweated out his life like a fool working in a factory, which of the women and girls came with a shriek and which made as though they took pleasure in sex when not once in all their lives had they felt anything at all, which girls managed to preserve their maidenhood intact while keeping countless men at their beck and call, going to bed with them too. People here even knew what others had forgotten about themselves, had wanted to forget or didn’t even know. At this very moment it would not take them long to learn who Zeynel was, how he had come to Istanbul from Rize and grown up destitute in Menekşe, how in the end he had killed the gangster Ihsan for no apparent reason and then met Dursun Kemal on Galata Bridge. By what wondrous means these things became known was an unfathomable mystery, but this close-packed little street which had not changed one whit since Ottoman times was informed of all that went on in Istanbul – even in such wealthy families as those of Vehbi Koç, Eczacibaşi and Erol Simavi. Every morning Geçermiş Street read the palm of Istanbul’s hand and told its fortune. If you should feel like it, go and spend a couple of days there, and all of Istanbul with its slums, its posh districts, the villas of the rich in Polonezköy or on the Islands, the suicides and murders, the gambling and smuggling and prostitution, the pleasure trips to Switzerland, Paris, London, all will be laid bare for you to read like a great open book. Geçermiş Street is the key to Istanbul, this inscrutable magic city. The inhabitants of these tiny clustering wooden houses, painted a honey colour years ago but now black and cracked, live through every phase of Istanbul life, its excesses, its slovenliness, its dirt and slime and stinking rottenness, its ruthlessness and hatreds, its merry-making and joys and beauties, its warm and generous love and friendship, its integrity, its rebelliousness, live it all many times amplified. In the back alleys of Beyoğlu too, in the outer quarters of Kumkapi, Kasimpaşa, Elmadag, Istanbul is experienced just as intensely. People like Kerami Usta who makes the loveliest nacre-inlaid shoeshine boxes, yet who never in all his life has taken a step out of Bakirköy, or like Blind Agop, the tavern-keeper in Kumkapi, or like Hüseyin Huri and the other vagrant boys in Sirkeci, these are the ones who live Istanbul to the full.

  The woman was bustling about at the sink. In no time she had cleaned the fish and was chopping an onion. Clitter-clatter went the sharp knife as she hummed an old Istanbul song to its rhythm. Putting the onion to simmer in a little water, she sprinkled it with salt and black pepper, then turned up the flame and laid the fish in the pan. Now and again as it was cooking she added some herbs. Over a round table she spread one of those gilt-embroidered Istanbul tablecloths, worn but snow-white, with three matching napkins, knives and forks, and an ancient gilded carafe and its glasses. Finally, in the middle of the table she placed a mauve-blooming fragrant Istanbul carnation in a slim spun-glass vase.

  And all the while she darted curious glances at Dursun Kemal and Zeynel who were whispering to each other, their faces alternately brightening and darkening. They fell silent when they realized she was watching them and sat there staring at the wall where, high above the divan, hung three gilt-framed photographs of uniformed, large-eyed, moustached officers, the one in the middle with frowning brows obviously of higher rank, a pasha maybe, but all three wearing fezes with tassels falling to the right. The white divan cover was embroidered with large roses, green leaves, mauve and yellow pansies, black-eyed narcissus and a coppery grapevine. Against one of the flaking, yellowing, limewashed walls was a seascape in a sooty frame, an imitation of Ayvazovski. A couple of very old Bukhara carpets were spread on the floor, tom and threadbare, but the colours still fresh as if they had been woven that very day. The windows were hung with clean white curtains, silver-embroidered. In a corner, reaching almost to the ceiling, was a glass-paned w
alnut cupboard carved with roses, antlered deer and swans. This large room served both as living-quarters and as a kitchen. Under a counter topped with a cracked slab of black-veined marble were a whole array of objects, plastic basins and pails, engraved copper bowls and ewers, old Istanbul candlesticks, tin pots and pans, a huge bronze brazier burnished bright, a capacious copper cauldron, a small pumpkin of an unusual red colour, a gilded pink Sèvres dish with a rose on the lid, an old Chinese vase with a blue dragon, broken and stuck together, funny little tables of wrought bronze, a beautiful pair of bellows with silver-nielloed ivory handles. The white marble slab was the kitchen corner and on it a gas stove was burning bluely. On the wall to the left was a gold-hafted sword, its gold all blackened now.

  The woman slid a green, blue and brown Kütahya coaster on to the table. ‘My name’s Zühre Paşali,’ she said.

  Zeynel’s eyes were suddenly arrested by the swaying of her hips. Ashamed, embarrassed as though caught red-handed, he just managed to blurt out: ‘Thank you, sister …’

  Her cheeks dimpling, her black eyes curious, she gazed at this young man with the parched face and blistered lips. There was something strange about him, but what? She turned away, her hips moving as though she wore nothing under her skirt. Zeynel felt his throat tightening. Something was spreading through the room from the woman’s hips, like a mist, like a heady smell, overpowering, and in that instant his penis rose, pushing at his trousers. She was now placing the steaming pan on the coaster, again diffusing that strange something from her body that appeared suddenly stark naked in the fumes of the pan. Zeynel broke into a sweat. His face red, he stared vacantly at his penis which was growing harder and harder. Zühre’s eyes, too, were riveted on his penis. Her cheeks had grown pink, her dimples deeper, her face moist.

  Dimly, as from a great distance, he was grabbing like a famished wolf at the furry mound between her bare legs, then flinging himself out of the house, the woman at his heels, catching up with him, down a slope, over a garden wall, the warm fragrance of a lime-tree around them, the woman unbuttoning his shirt, Dursun Kemal’s wide stare frozen in unbelief, the woman seizing his penis, never letting go, dragging him on, the odour of crushed lettuce, the mud, the thick-trunked tree under which she fell upon him and wrenched the jeans off his legs, her moaning as she came, the searing through his body, his entering a warm maddening place … All far away, like a blurred twilit memory …

  Dursun Kemal was running after him, carrying something in his hand, something he wanted to give him … The Beşiktaş boat landing-stage, green neon lights, the dark night … Through the red, green, blue, orange neon lights he rushed and on to the ferry, his penis still erect, moist. Dursun Kemal, his eyes still frozen in that wide stare, vanished slowly, just a dark green spot in the raw green of a neon lamp …

  Suddenly Dursun Kemal’s voice rang out and in that instant Zeynel recovered his senses. He was at the point of the Seraglio. Like lightning he leaped behind the empty pond, his revolver already aimed.

  ‘Don’t move or I shoot!’ He raised the revolver a little above the policemen and fired three times at the lamppost. ‘Throw down your guns!’

  The policemen did as they were told.

  Zeynel’s penis was down at last. He was glad of that. Then he spotted Hüseyin Huri behind the policemen, a gun in his hand. ‘You too, throw that gun down, you son-of-a-bitch.’ Hüseyin Huri dropped his gun. ‘Hands up, all of you … Kemal, go and bring those guns to me.’

  The boy, who had been standing by like a shrivelled tree, moved at last. He picked up the guns.

  ‘Now get their ammunition, their money, whatever, they have.’

  With great care Dursun Kemal went through the pockets of the policemen and of Hüseyin Huri and brought everything to Zeynel.

  ‘So, Hüseyin Huri, you low-down fag, you asshole, you wanted to turn me in, eh? I’m going to kill you.’

  ‘Don’t kill me! I’ve been a fool. I’ll never do it again, I swear. Never! I’ll help you. May my two eyes drop out if I don’t, may I see my mother dead and my father too …’

  ‘All right, then. Get these chaps’ belts and tie their hands behind their backs.’

  Hüseyin Huri obeyed with alacrity.

  ‘You, Kemal, take this gun and go with Hüseyin Huri to bring some ropes from our hideout. Hüseyin will lead you, but don’t let the dog out of your sight. If he tries to run, let him have it. And don’t get too near him, he’s very quick. He’ll jump on you and take your gun away.’

  ‘He won’t, Zeynel Abi!’

  Hüseyin Huri, with Dursun Kemal following, vanished into the darkness of Gülhane Park. They were soon back with the ropes.

  ‘Now, both of you, make these cops lie down and truss them up properly.’

  9

  The sea was still pale when Fisher Selim reached Hayirsiz Island. He dropped anchor six hundred metres west and cast his line. He was tired today, stretching himself and yawning till his jaws ached. His mind was preoccupied with other things. Land prices were going up every day. If he wasn’t quick about it, he would never in all his life be able to buy that land he’d had his eye on for so long and if he didn’t buy it he could not attain his heart’s desire …

  Soon he had forgotten the sea, the fishing line, the world around him, and was adrift in that happy, exhilarating dream of long ago. Often on mornings like these when the sea lay all pale about him, he would give himself up to the thrill of that dream, and if a fish bit the hook, he would not even feel its tug and the fish would remain dangling like that at the end of the line.

  A group of nurses in white uniforms, white stockings, white shoes, white caps, all flaxen-haired, all blue-eyed … Selim was passing in front of them. His shoulder hurt him. That old bullet wound … Something drops in the midst of the group of nurses and they scatter away out of sight. And Selim is lying on an iron bed in white sheets smelling of soap, the bullet still in his shoulder, tormenting him. He is delirious, seeing those far-off mountains he has never known. There, on the steep mauve crags, among rippling brooks, they were fleeing … Behind, the pounding of cannon, the crackle of rifles … Crossing a defile … So many dead, so many many wounded … The sniping coming from the crags … His father erect on a white horse, a hawk-nosed fair man with an Adam’s apple jutting from his long neck and bright, very bright moss-green eyes, a Circassian dagger at his tight nielloed belt, his leather boots worn and scuffed … His mother, so beautiful, her waist so slim … Bitter, never smiling, forever keening for her three brothers who had died on the march … Now and again one of the horsemen fell to the ground screaming, hit by a bullet. The human flood pressing behind picked him up, laid him on a rock on the edge of the defile if he was dead, threw him over a horse if he was still alive. It was a long trek, a long battle there on the craggy heights. His father too was hit and slipped from his horse, but his mother helped him up again. The blood gushed out of him as from a fountain. His beautiful mother was steeped in it. This battle that he had never seen, Selim still lived through it, so many times had he heard it told, every detail, every instant, even the smell of gunpowder. They stopped on a plain, a wide expanse of green, bounded on the far horizon by a thin dark line that was the forest. And there on the plain, in front of the tents, the Circassian girls and youths danced the kazaska for joy at having come out alive from the war. Horses were being sacrificed in thanksgiving. A tall, lean, white-bearded man was the oldest of these people who had survived fire and death, a very old man with a slow pensive gait. As the smoke of the dying camp-fires floated low over the plain they saw the old man making towards the mountains whence they had come. All the people followed him. He came to a river. There was a burst of rifle fire and the old man fell into the water. In an instant the river had swept him away, out of sight.

  Far, very far now, the tall snow-clad Caucasus Mountains … His father had knelt down facing the lofty peaks. White clouds were floating half-way up their slopes. Three times he had kissed the mossy earth. Perhaps we s
hall never, never ever see you again, oh, our mother, our mountain … He had prayed there, a long farewell prayer to his native land. And afterwards, as they trekked down south, the plains heard their long-drawn-out plaints. Selim heard them much later in the rocky foothills of the Taurus Mountains, the shrill razor-sharp cries, the never-ending keening of these war-stricken migrants for their dead, for the high mountains, for the homeland they had been tom from, heard them all over their wanderings on many mountains, Ararat, Süphan, Nemrut, Erciyes, Hasandağ … Heard them on the burning poisonous earth of the Chukurova where half of them perished. Then they came to Uzunyayla, and there built beautiful houses and once more raised noble horses, once more fashioned Circassian saddles and silver-nielloed daggers. And there Selim was born. And from there ran away, on the death of his father, straight to Istanbul …

  For him, it was a time of gallivanting with girls. Especially with the Greek girls of Samatya … Many a one lost her heart to Selim, falling for his tall figure, his fair hair, his long reddish moustache, his deep blue eyes … All gone from his mind now, save perhaps that willowy Greek lass with the black eyes and sunburnt legs, for the love of whom Selim renounced his rowdy ways and took up fishing, determined to lead an honest life and to marry her. But one day when he had gone to see her as usual he found the house deserted. The mother had taken her daughter and fled to Athens. This was too much for Selim’s pride. He fell back again into his old wild ways. The girl would not have left him, he knew; it was the mother who had spirited her away, and for a long time he nursed the idea of going to Athens to bring her back. And then, without warning, he was conscripted and sent to the east. There, in the midst of the snowy mountains, he remembered his mother and his childhood home at Uzunyayla. She must be alive still and he had brothers and sisters too. They must still be there, farming and raising horses, still singing those nostalgic laments for their lofty Caucasian homeland, still dancing the lezginka at those endless wedding festivities. An irresistible longing to see them, to hear again his native Circassian tongue, gripped him and he swore to himself to return as soon as his service in the army was over.