The Sea-Crossed Fisherman

by Yashar Kemal

  ‘Shall I get a basin for you, Abi?’ the boy asked eagerly.

  ‘You hold this line,’ Dursun Kemal said, ‘and if a fish strikes pull it up quickly.’

  He was soon back, still holding the bleeding, twitching fish in one hand and a brand-new pink basin in the other. ‘Give me the line,’ he said to the boy, ‘and you fetch some water in that pail there.’

  The boy ran to let the green pail down into the sea. When he emptied it into the basin, the fish gave a jerk, then floated tranquilly round and round. The little boy’s limpid green eyes glowed as they went from the fish to Dursun Kemal. It was not long before Dursun Kemal’s right arm shot up again. ‘It’s a very large one this time,’ he laughed, and the little boy laughed with him, showing a set of white pearly teeth. And indeed a huge bonito was whisking this way and that at the end of the line. Dursun Kemal dropped it into the basin. ‘Freshen up the water,’ he ordered the boy, who hurried up to the pail, rinsed it carefully and then filled up the basin again.

  He was a freckled-faced little thing of about ten with a mop of frizzy, bright-red hair. His faded, tattered trousers only came down to his knees. He wore a blue shirt and a belt as large as a bandolier, with a shiny bronze buckle. He had no shoes and his bare feet were coated with dirt.

  ‘Abi!’ he said. ‘What a marvellous fisherman you are! There isn’t another like you here.’ He sidled up to Dursun Kemal until their arms touched. ‘Ah, if only I could be like you … If only I had a line and could catch fish just like you …’

  Dursun Kemal turned to him and patted his head with avuncular affection. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m called Ahmet, Abi.’

  ‘And I’m Dursun Kemal.’

  Ahmet licked his lips. ‘What a nice name!’

  Dursun Kemal likened him to a little dog wagging its tail, wriggling at his feet, longing for human contact. Ahmet could not keep still. He kept frisking round Dursun Kemal. His joy was infectious. Dursun Kemal felt a growing brightness inside.

  ‘Where are your parents?’ he asked suddenly.

  Ahmet scratched his nose. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Well, Abi …’ Ahmet hesitated, scratching his neck this time. ‘They’ve gone away.’

  ‘Gone?’

  ‘Well, it’s like this, Abi …’ Ahmet spoke quickly, smiling with all his white teeth, as though what he was saying had nothing to do with him. ‘My father drank all the time. He always came home swaying on his feet and beat my mother. Then, we had this neighbour, Tuncer Abi … He fell in love with my mother and my father beat my mother a lot and he wept a lot too … Then mother and Tuncer Abi ran away. She kissed me and said, “Don’t be afraid, my Ahmet, Tuncer will come and fetch you too.” My father got very drunk and cried a lot more. Then he took a gun and a long long knife and went off to kill Tuncer Abi and Mother. I waited and waited at home and a neighbour, Aunt Zehra, gave me some bread while I waited. But Tuncer Abi never came, nor my father either, and in the end Aunt Zehra told me to go away. “I haven’t enough to feed my own children,” she said, “you must go somewhere else …”’

  ‘Where do you sleep, then?’

  ‘At the station, in empty wagons.’

  ‘Good for you,’ said Dursun Kemal and pulled out another fish.

  Ahmet clapped his hands and danced with glee. ‘Abi,’ he cried, ‘please let me unhook it.’

  ‘All right,’ Dursun Kemal said.

  Ahmet pulled the fish free and looked to Dursun Kemal for approval.

  ‘Good, very good,’ Dursun Kemal said and cast the line again.

  ‘I’m waiting here for my Tuncer Abi. He’s sure to come if my father hasn’t killed him. The fishermen round here give me fish and bread to eat and I help them sell their catch. Sometimes I even have soup …’ He pointed to the little cookshop under the bridge. ‘There’s an old uncle there who gives me a bowl now and then, good warm soup … He’ll come, my Tuncer Abi, won’t he?’ The boy looked hopefully into Dursun Kemal’s eyes.

  ‘He will,’ Dursun Kemal assured him.

  ‘Yes, he must,’ Ahmet said. ‘Because otherwise …’

  The bridge shook under the heavy weight of the traffic above, but in the little coffee-house underneath the usual sprinkling of old pensioners sat on, lethargic, paunchy, smoking their nargilehs. Boats kept drawing alongside the bridge, disgorging hurrying crowds, and then departed again engulfing more crowds with belching black smoke from their funnels.

  At every fish that Dursun Kemal caught, Ahmet uttered cries of delight and capered round him, but Dursun Kemal’s face was growing longer and longer. Ahmet could make nothing of this and clowned even more to try to coax a smile from him. A mist was slowly settling over the Golden Horn and the crowd under the bridge was growing denser, squeezing the boys against the parapet. Dursun Kemal had now lost all interest in what he was doing. His eyes were glued on the stairway.

  ‘He won’t come,’ he moaned at last, clenching his fists. His face was drawn beyond recognition, his lips quivering. ‘It’s no use, he’ll never come …’ The line slipped from his hands, the float dropped to the ground under people’s feet.

  ‘The line, Abi!’ Ahmet cried. ‘It’s going …’ He caught it just in time.

  ‘I don’t want it. It’s yours.’ Dursun Kemal was breaking down. ‘My mother … She’s dead. My father killed her. He stabbed her in front of my eyes. She begged him, she kissed his feet. Haven’t you seen it in the newspapers? He was like a madman with that dagger. She was screaming, dying at every thrust of the dagger. Blood gushed out of her … Such a lot of blood … She flung herself from wall to wall and the walls streamed with blood. The bed, the room was full of blood … I ran away because my father was going to kill me too. Then he brought the police home and he wept and he said the gangster Zeynel Çelik killed my wife … But he didn’t. You don’t believe Zeynel Çelik killed my mother, do you, Ahmet?’

  ‘No, no …’

  ‘And now Zeynel Abi’s gone. He’s left me. I was so sure he’d come here …’

  ‘He will, he will.’

  ‘He won’t! He’ll never come back again.’ Dursun Kemal burst into tears. ‘Oh, my mother … My mother … My heart hurts, it hurts …’ His head on the cold iron of the parapet, he was sobbing uncontrollably. Ahmet soon joined him, weeping bitterly in unison, forgetting even to draw up the line, which was heavy with fish. Nobody paid any attention to the two children sobbing their hearts out on the parapet of the bridge.

  Dursun Kemal was the first to lift his head. Their swollen reddened eyes met and suddenly they fell into each other’s arms. Dursun Kemal cradled Ahmet tightly and murmured to him as if singing a lullaby, ‘Don’t cry, Ahmet, please don’t cry …’

  ‘All right, Abi, I won’t.’ The little boy’s tearful eyes were already smiling.

  ‘Here, take this fishing line. It’s yours.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Look, you can have those marbles too.’ Ahmet stared as though a wizard was standing before him. ‘I’ve got a lot of money.’ Dursun Kemal thrust his hand into his pocket and, taking out a wad of money, selected a few hundred-lira notes. ‘Here, you can have these.’

  Ahmet just stood there transfixed, unable to say a word in the face of such a miracle.

  ‘Hey,’ Dursun Kemal shouted. ‘Careful, your line’s slipping.’

  Ahmet pounced on the line and drew out a huge fish. Quickly, he unhooked it and placed it in the basin. His eyes met Dursun Kemal’s and the two boys suddenly burst out laughing.

  For a long time, the crowds of passers-by saw two little boys facing each other and splitting their sides on the edge of the water.

  22

  All through that night Zeynel lay awake, thinking of Vasili and the places he would go to, Greece, Germany … His future loomed before him like a dark impenetrable forest. Still, he had such a lot of money … He would make his way to Germany, find a job, marry perhaps and have children. And at the
first amnesty he could always come back. He would buy a good fishing-boat, equipped with radar, broad-keeled, painted blue and orange. He would have eighteen deck-hands addressing him as Skipper Zeynel, rising respectfully to their feet when they saw him. He was saved. He wasn’t going to die. In a little while they would be setting out. What a trump he had turned out to be, Fisher Selim … He might be miserly, he might be money-grubbing … And hadn’t he killed his friend, Hristo, one day at sea, so as to get his boat? Everyone in Menekşe and Kumkapi knew this, though they never spoke of it openly. They were frightened of him, everyone except Fatma Woman … Anyway, Lame Hasan thought the world of him. Fisher Selim had been quite a daredevil in his youth and it was only after he had fallen in love that he became so taciturn and aloof. People spoke of how he would sit on the shore in the moonlight, waiting for his beloved, talking to himself, lost to the world. They said she was a fair-haired beauty and that through all these years he had saved and scrimped only for her. But others said it was a mermaid he had fallen in love with and when some fisherman had killed her he had gone crazy and not been seen in Kumkapi or Menekşe for many years. In the end, he had run down the fisherman who had killed her and skinned him alive, gouged his eyes out and proceeded with unabated fury to slice him up in little pieces. They said he’d had seven children with her, three boys and four girls. He had taken the boys to his family in Uzunyayla, and there they still were, pining for the sea. As for the girls, they had slipped back into the water, mermaids like their mother, and could still be seen combing their long streaming golden tresses …

  Though Zeynel had never quite credited this story, he remembered how in his childhood, back in that craggy wooded Black Sea village, he had heard tell of mermaids and how they fell in love with human beings. Everyone here, even little children, spoke of Fisher Selim’s passion for the mermaid. Besides, he had been seen making love to her. And there were some who had seen him killing Hristo too, off the coast of Yassiada, striking him on the head with an iron bar, laughing as he stuffed him into a sack with a huge stone to drag him down to the bottom of the sea. ‘One infidel the less in this world,’ he had said. Farewell, friend Hristo, you’ve had more than your share of gallivanting with those brown-legged Greek girls …’

  Should he have brought Dursun Kemal with him? Perhaps Fisher Selim would have taken him on as a deck-hand. Or would he have let him go hungry, refused to give him his due, beaten him black and blue? What would the boy do now, motherless, all alone in Istanbul city? What if Hüseyin Huri recognized him and turned him over to the police? Would the boy remember about the police guns they had hidden in the Valide Mosque? What had he done on waking and finding Zeynel gone? Was he angry? Or was he searching high and low for him all over the city? Darting around the flaming port, among stampeding buffaloes and crashing shop-windows, under a shower of splintering glass? How that girl’s hands had trembled at the cashier’s desk in the bank! She had fainted away too. And the policemen, how frightened they’d been of him! He could have stripped them naked and paraded them all over Beyoğlu. Naked policemen blowing their whistles, bellowing buffaloes, whinnying horses hurtling through flames and breaking glass … And over them all, over the naked policemen wielding guns and truncheons, over black roaring buffaloes, red bulls, rearing horses, a rain of flaming slivers of glass … And over a ship ablaze in the Bosphorus a great eagle gliding with wide tensed wings from the ship to Haghia Sophia and back again, swooping in and out of the flames, hurled hither and thither by a mad northeaster, its wings flurrying and fanning out. And Ihsan brandishing a dagger, stabbing and stabbing, and the blood gushing out, blood, blood, blood …

  He rose from his bed and went into the garden. The shadow of Fisher Selim’s skiff was bobbing near the pier. Yesterday, he had filled up at the depot and stored an extra six cans of petrol under the stem. All was ready. They were going. He was saved. A soaring gladness enveloped him. He was leaving behind all the horror, the blood and death and shame.

  He went into the house and out again, on tenterhooks, afraid to wake the sleeping Selim, yet chafing to be gone. As the first aeroplane roared down into Yeşilköy Airport, he could wait no longer. What if the police were to come now, what if they caught up with them just as they put out to sea? He saw shadows stirring in the darkness and rushed inside.

  ‘Uncle Selim,’ he cried, shaking him frantically. ‘Uncle Selim, look it’s day already. They’re coming!’

  Fisher Selim lifted his head. ‘Who’s coming?’

  ‘The police …’

  Fisher Selim sprang to the door. ‘It’s only some fishermen,’ he said as he switched on the light. ‘Anyway, we’d better be getting on too. Bring me that suitcase.’ He had bought a large brown suitcase the day before in Beyoğlu. It had a double bottom. ‘We’ll put your money in here. You’ll need it in those foreign lands.’

  Zeynel pulled the bags out from under the bed and gave them to Selim, who took out the packets of banknotes and packed them neatly in the lower compartment. ‘Is it really as much as the newspapers say?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Zeynel said. ‘It’s a lot of money.’ His eyes were fixed on Selim’s hands as though hypnotized. Then, as Selim was about to empty the third bag, he grabbed it and looked at Selim pleadingly. ‘Uncle Selim,’ he said, his face flaming, his voice trembling with shame, ‘that money’s quite enough for me. Anyway, I’ll find a job in Germany. You take this.’

  ‘But I don’t want it,’ Selim protested. ‘I’m not doing this for money.’

  ‘If you don’t take it, then I won’t go,’ Zeynel said. ‘I’ll stay here and the police will find me and riddle me with bullets …’

  ‘Listen,’ Selim said, ‘you must give this money to Vasili so he can send you to Germany. So he can get a passport for you … You’ll see how expensive all that will be.’

  ‘But I need money here too, for when I come back. When there’s an amnesty …’

  ‘Look here, it’s getting late. It’ll soon be day …’ But however much Selim argued, he could not convince Zeynel. ‘All right, then,’ he said finally. ‘Wait here until I put this away somewhere.’ He took the bag and went out. Half an hour passed and Zeynel, shuttling in and out of the house, anxiously scanning the empty road, the sea, the darkened railway station, was more dead than alive by the time he returned.

  Selim closed the bottom compartment of the suitcase and then placed over it the new suit and underclothes he had bought for Zeynel, a pair of shoes and some socks. He had even bought three ties. He laid them out carefully and then locked the suitcase. ‘Come on,’ he said.

  The sea was only just paling and a few fishermen were also putting out. Selim fired the engine and set the rudder for Silivri.

  ‘Shall I lie down on the bottom?’ Zeynel asked.

  ‘No,’ said Selim.

  ‘But what if they see me?’

  ‘They won’t notice. You’re my deck-hand now. Sit down here behind me near the rudder and don’t be afraid.’

  ‘I’m not afraid,’ Zeynel said, his teeth chattering. ‘But rev up the motor so we can get away from here quickly.’

  Fisher Selim gunned the engine to top speed, while Zeynel clung to the gunwale, all his limbs trembling.

  As they came level with Büyükçekmece, the sun rose. Fisher Selim eased down the motor and they sailed on evenly through the calm sea. He looked at Zeynel’s face and felt a pang of pity. He was quite green and his eyes were starting from his head. Selim pretended not to notice.

  ‘Let me brew you some tea now, Zeynel. We’ll have a good breakfast, the two of us, and in a few days we’ll have passed Çanakkale Strait. We’ll sail by night too, close to the shore … And then I’ll hand you over safe and sound to Vasili.’

  He slowed down the motor, kindled some sticks of wood on a tin plate, filled a kettle with water from a plastic flask and set it on the fire. It was soon boiling and he dropped a pinch of tea into it with his long fingers. In a moment, the fragrant smell of tea rose from the bub
bling kettle. He turned off the motor and the boat glided to a stop, swaying slightly. From the shore came the crowing of cocks and the barking of dogs. At this sound, Zeynel’s spirits rose. ‘We’re saved,’ he murmured.

  ‘So we are,’ Selim said reassuringly. From the forehold, he produced a nylon tablecloth printed with large pink roses. He spread it out on the after deck and put some bread, cheese and olives on it. Then he poured out the tea into two pink-handled mugs. ‘Well, let’s eat,’ he said and, breaking a large chunk from the loaf, he swallowed it down with a swig from his mug. He found the tea not sweet enough and added a couple of sugar lumps. ‘D’you want some more too?’ he asked Zeynel.

  ‘Yes.’

  They finished their breakfast and set off again, the boat gathering way and the seagulls, which had followed them ever since Menekşe, flying overhead. Three large passenger ships, their lights still burning, sailed past, one after the other. Zeynel thought he saw a group of policemen in the last one, but it went swiftly by, leaving their little craft rocking in its wake.

  Blue waters flowed past … Dark, reddish, flaming … Süleyman’s eyes had grown enormous, his mouth gaped. Remzi and Özcan were swearing. Their engine had broken down and the boat was adrift in the dark rainy night, tossed like a nutshell on the rough sea. They clung to each other against the gunwale, freezing, helpless, utterly lost. The boat was leaking, sinking … They were up to their knees in water. Terrified, Zeynel kept muttering over and over again the elham prayer which his father had taught him, with the advice that he say it whenever he was in a tight spot.

  And now, clinging tightly to the gunwale, Zeynel was again repeating that prayer. His lips twitched, his neck was tensed and all the blood had drained from his face. Why hadn’t he wanted to take the money I gave him, this stingy Fisher Selim? he was thinking. Because he plans to do away with me. Now, as soon as the sun has set … Then he’ll take all the money … Fisher Selim is the worst moneygrubber on earth. Did he not strike Hristo dead to take possession of this very boat? And what about Skipper Bald Dursun? Didn’t he leap into the sea when Selim shot him, bellowing like an ox, staining the water red with his blood, and didn’t Selim fish him out and fasten a thirty-kilo marble slab to his neck and weigh him down? It’s all lies what they say, that he did it to avenge the death of the mermaid. He did it for Bald Dursun’s money. A whole bagful of it, he had … Yes … And in those days people were fleeing from Russia over the Black Sea to Istanbul, men, women, children, with bagfuls of money too, and Selim would pick up the refugees from the Russian coast in his boat, telling them he was going to take them to Vasili, and when they were way out on the high seas he would shoot them all, one after the other, boring great holes in their heads, and the refugees would leap screaming into the water, but nobody heard their cries. He would tie heavy stones round their necks too, Selim, and throw them to the bottom of the Black Sea and take all their money and then return to Odessa for more … And in the dark rain-driven night, as the quails come dropping on to the shore with wet weary wings, Selim is there again, shooting them down …