That’s just how it is. But why? I have all these books to read. I don’t have much money, but I have a home. I have a wood-burning stove and food. There’s a radio downstairs … I can’t go into town. I just can’t go, but you’re not to think I don’t have it in me to climb a mountain. Ha! I’d throw on my cap and it’s high-ho to Kalpazankaya. The sun’s nearly setting. Oh God, watch out! “The sun’s nearly setting.” Now for a description of the world. But my heart’s just not in it: no painting the waves for me tonight, no toasting the horizon like a slice of bread.
See! We did it again. We painted the waves. We toasted the horizon just perfectly.
That’s just how we are. We were trained to write bad literature: there’s no way around it. We should turn back to poetry.
I said I couldn’t go into town. Why not? So here’s the crux of the matter. Over the last four or five lines I’ve been holding back a secret. Something really strange. The key is in the sentence, I can’t go into town. I can’t tell you how much I’d like to unravel it for you. But it’s not in my power. No really, it’s there. I just can’t write it down. Wouldn’t they laugh at me if I did? But what’s wrong with that? If man wasn’t born to be ridiculed, then he was born to laugh at others. It all leads to the same door. Or it leads nowhere. They’re one and the same. But I can. I hate to see someone laughed at. Do I like to be laughed at? Who would? That goes without saying. Well then you’ll say, look, you’re making a distinction. But if I were to say I did this to feel more human, you couldn’t say I was soft in the head. And if you did, then the hell with it! All men are flawed, all animals, too …
What if I told you I was a civil servant, and relatively well-off? Earning as much as four or five hundred lira a month. With two daughters. Who are at the school just over there. With a confident, well-dressed woman for a wife. I bring home all the money I earn. My main monthly expense is a kilo of rakı. We have a refrigerator at home, I don’t know how it got there, but it’s there. I keep the bottles inside. Sometimes, at the beginning of the month, I still have one bottle with two fingers left in it. I hold myself back so I can share a little with a friend who swings by in the evening. No matter what state he’s in! Let’s say I have other bad habits. I have a few running tabs here and there. To be paid at the top of the month, of course. There’s a debt of sixty-three lira and eighty-five kuruş that I’ll need to wriggle away from the wife. Maybe I spent it all carousing. Maybe it’s just a small tab at the tobacconist, for newspapers and Bafra cigarettes; two or three beers and a lemon soda at the club; and almost seventeen lira at the patisserie.
How can I go into town when I still haven’t paid off last month’s debts, when I also need fifty-six lira for other inevitable expenses? I can’t show my face down there, can I? I could end the story just like that. Some would laugh. Others would pity me. Some would say, “Now there’s a real story.”
Some would be delighted and say, “He can’t write any more.” But then you all know that I’m not a civil servant. A civil servant might be the type to get hung up on the shopkeeper or the street sweeper, or tobacconist — schmabacconist! Or maybe not. He might not. If he did, he wouldn’t owe more than three packs of Bafra, three cones from the ice-cream man, no more than seven coffees from the coffee house. Ipso facto, I wouldn’t care if I did.
That’s not why I can’t go into town. Well then, why can’t I? Are you even interested? I doubt it. You couldn’t care less, I’m sure. If you think I’m making too big a deal of this, go ahead and say so. But it’s not being able to go downtown that gave me the key to this story. If I tried to explain why, though … it would take me too long. So why waste more time? Let’s just say I can’t bear seeing anyone and end it there.
Enough of this! From now on: I just can’t go into town, and that’s that.
Oh, these prohibitions! These prohibitions that we place on ourselves. And the ones that others place on us and we place on them. That the state places on its citizens, and the citizens on the state, and municipalities on residents, and residents on the municipality …
If we can’t live in a world of prohibitions, then how can we live in a world without them? Why is it that animals, even our pets, can live quite happily without them? They lead simple lives, bounding here and there, feeling oh so fine, apart from the racket they kick up when they need to kill their hunger — while we seem to believe that we can’t survive, unless we’re hemmed in by laws. We might even describe humans as animals who are against the law. Isn’t each and every germ against the law? Love is against the law, too. The day will come when water and food will be, too. We’ll each be out of bounds for all others.
I can’t kiss that beautiful boy when I want to! I can’t swim in the sea when I want to; my lungs are weak and the doctor has forbidden it. I can’t drink when I want to; it’s come to the point where I’m afraid, it strangles my mind, my liver forbids it. I can’t just hop onto a boat for Haydarpaşa and huff it all the way out to Van. I’d croak along the way … I can’t go into town. God damn the place anyway. The shopkeeper from Karaman might very well have pearls threaded into his moustache and he may have gilded his hair in gold. He might have encased his entire body in silver. But then what’s silver to him?
And the delicatessen — that man has stocked his place so full of food that even if he took all his sausages to the pier, and got a fire going, and invited the whole town to get their fill of sausage and wine, while the cats swarmed, and the dogs howled, and the torches flamed, even if he banded together with all the fishermen and Kurdish porters and cats and dogs of all the summer houses of Istanbul to put on a wedding party lasting forty days and forty nights, only then would he run out of supplies. And if on the forty-first day he got in more salami and sausages, and fresh cheese and wine, he’d have enough to enrich himself for another forty days.
He’d still wander around town in his disgusting apron, sucking on the fenugreek seeds in his teeth. That dark moustache would still glisten with oil, and his skin would still stink of garlic. His stomach would still be sprinkled with cheese crumbs, and his wrists would be as thick as my ankles.
And then — the baker! That bullwhip of a baker who flogs his oil-drenched pastry off on the child laborers in the morning for thirty-five kuruş. That’s all very well, but he never gives you change and you’re always too scared to ask for it because he’ll just give you more bread instead. He’s always having new houses built so he can rent them out. He lets his goats gobble through the freshest shrubbery in the village …
And then there’s the master butcher you can smell from fifty feet away, who sits in his chair from morning till night, dreaming of goats and buffaloes and fatty organs, who pads that nasty organ fat into every half kilo of meat he puts through his grinder. You might think I don’t want to go into town because I don’t want to look these people in the eye. But that’s not it, not at all, that’s not why I won’t go into town, because be sure that if I did, I’d call out to the shopkeeper, “Hey Barba Niko,” and to the baker, “Oho, master Haralambo,” and to the butcher, “Oooooh, Abdülbekir.”
It’s not like they’re the only ones in town. There’s Iskanavi, the proprietor of our coffeehouse. A man without a care in the world. He doesn’t even know the meaning of money. He’s just a little more distracted when he doesn’t have it, like anyone else. And when he has it, he’s always laughing. For him, a ten-lira note and a hundred-lira note are more or less the same thing. He doesn’t ask for much. He’s a sweet man. During one of the wars, he hid in the attic until it was over. He only came out to the square when the armistice was announced. He had all kinds of stories about his days up in the attic.