The folk remedies they’d suggested for his ulcer didn’t always work. There were times when he would almost complain. The lines on his face would deepen, as if to bemoan his eighty years of stoic, noble sacrifice. Blurred by sadness, his blue eyes would seem to question human company and the rule it enforced. And perhaps these were the times when the ulcer was giving him the most pain. When he spoke directly about the ulcer, the pain was probably less severe. He had been at home for days, alone with his pain. And maybe that was why he’d come out — so that he could grumble about the pain on his way down the hill, or even before he started.
“How goes it, Barba Antimos?”
“Not so good. It’s quite troubling, sir. I can’t sleep, can’t eat. I had a little soup yesterday. But that made me …”
“It’ll pass, Barba Antimos.”
He pursed his lips. He had beautiful lips. The lips of a five-year-old child.
“The doctor at the Bulgarian hospital gave me some medicine, but it doesn’t always work. You just never know.”
Lean on any wall on this island. Sit on it. Climb over it or pelt it with stones. Whatever you do, you will find in it his mortar, sweat, and toil. You will find no mosaics in them, no ersatz wood or stone. He makes his walls the same way they made them two thousand years ago, and they hide secrets just as old. Greek gods, epic lovers, heroes railing against injustice. Touch a wall that Barba Antimos has made, and you touch antiquity. Pull a bag of Byzantine gold out of one of his cisterns — just three years old — and you’d be hard pressed to find an archaeologist to challenge its authenticity. Grow a boxwood vine over an arbor outside one of his cottages and it won’t be long before you’re expecting Socrates himself to greet you the moment you step inside. And then, one summer night, when you’re sitting at your table drinking wine, you’ll see Alcibiades draw his blade on Socrates and say: “Fine then, have it your way. But tell me this. How can a man live as long as you have without becoming an immortal? Why, after eighty years of gathering wisdom and unearthing secrets, and finally discovering true happiness, must he leave this world behind?”
Should you lack the confidence to guess how Socrates might have answered such a question, you hold your tongue. Instead you gaze up at the stars through the dangling grapes and then down at your glass of wine. Then, with Homer at your side, you follow a path that winds among the walls and houses and hollowed cisterns that grace the island with nothing but good taste; you find the true path that runs from Byzantium to the simplicity and poetry of the ancient Greek world, and away from the monstrous villas of the modern age.
Barba Antimos never falters in the face of adversity. He makes just enough to get by. As long as his arms are strong, he brings beauty to everything he touches. But when his ulcer flares up, not even 250 grams of Halvah wedged in bread can bring him comfort. His gnarled and knotted muscles go limp. And all that’s left of him is the light in his clear blue eyes and the smoke in his blond, Maxim Gorki moustache and his long, mortar-white hair. No one remembers what he did anymore — the houses he embellished, the walls he strengthened, the lime he covered with mortar and made beautiful with his hands.
Did he know how beautiful he made everything he touched? Would he be so humble if he did? If it had been his apprentice Hristo, we would never have heard the end of it. “Now that’s one of my walls,” he would have said. “Rip out a few stones and it’ll still be standing.” But Barba Antimos — he never said a thing.
Now he lives with Diyojen in one of his own houses, but every couple of days he comes down to drink milk with his old friend and compatriot, Pandeli Usta. Some mornings I see him drinking milk in Pandeli’s dairy shop. Draining his glass, he smiles as if his face has been caressed by a mountain breeze. And his eyes look pure enough to drink; they look like milk. Barba Antimos never breathes a word of his sorrow. But I’ll tell you.
For forty years now he has carried a secret, a bitter and unspeakable secret. For forty years now, he has been pouring his grief into his walls. And some evenings, when I lean against them, I can feel them shuddering, shaking, trembling.
The Serpent in Alemdağ
The snow had already begun to fall when we walked into the theater. When we came out the square was covered in snow. A drop fell down my neck into my shirt. I shivered.
“Get your hand out of your mouth. Don’t bite your nails,” I yelled, and a couple walking ahead of us turned around.
They slowed down to get a better look at my face. I felt as lonely as I always did when he was with me. He’d come on Fridays. And the pipe-smoking plaster-cast sailor would be there, waiting to greet him.
The sun on the oilskin curtain made it exactly three. When I was absolutely sure he was coming, I’d let myself doze off. When he pounded on the door like he was scrambling up it, I’d hear it in my dream. I’d jump out of bed. I’d open the door. And there he’d be, ashen-faced, and breathing through the mouth. He’d pull a cigarette off the table and light up.
The world was far away. Here there was a cabinet, a mirror, a sailor cast in plaster, a bed, another mirror, a telephone, an armchair, books, newspapers, matchsticks, cigarette butts, a stove, and a blanket. The world was far away. There were planes in the sky.
Inside were passengers. The trains were running, too. Some brute signs a piece of paper and another gives him money. An evening coolness had emerged. And now the evening simits had come out into the world …
A simit vendor’s call floated through the room. The world was far away.
A ticket collector is stapling tickets; a man and a boy are poring over a newspaper. A strong young man is stretched out on the bench. A good-looking, powerful young man with dark eyebrows. To my right lies an emaciated creature with his hands stuffed in his pockets. The boy has stopped reading. His overcoat is rolled up under his head. He’s stretched out, too. I’m in the lower cabin of a ferryboat.
It’s Friday. School’s out. We live on Kirazlı Mescit Street in Süleymaniye. I’m around seventeen. I can remember the pine tree at the Münir Pasha Konak. That enormous pine in the high school garden that probably burned in the fire. The frescos in oil paint on the ceilings of the Münir Pasha Konak have long since turned to smoke and ash. The bedbugs burned, too. My bed and my blanket and my tears, all burned: the pools burned; the evergreens burned; memories, those memories burned; that sunburnt boy burned; the books that brought me here, all burned.
I have to find some imitation sheepskin to sew into my overcoat.
It’s Monday. I’m in the ferryboat’s lower cabin again, and again it’s snowing. Again Istanbul is ugly. Istanbul? Istanbul’s an ugly city, a dirty city, on rainy days especially. Are other days any better? No. They’re not. On other days the bridge is covered in bile. The back streets are covered in rubble and mud. The nights are like vomit. The houses turn their backs to the sun. The streets are narrow, the merchants cruel, and the rich indifferent. People are the same everywhere. Even those two asleep on the bed with the gilded frame — they’re not together. They’re alone.
The world is filled with loneliness. It all begins with loving another human being, and in this world, it ends the same way.