Turning to his companion, Ömer said, “Get rid of this one. He’s a worthless piece of shit. A coward.”
The forty-five-year-old man turned to the youth who was three paces behind them, shoulders hunched.
“Go home, my boy, and get some sleep.”
The boy vanished with the wind, saying nothing. The men continued in silence until they reached the shore. Here there were boatmen, still waiting for customers despite the late hour, but when they saw these two they made no offers. After jumping across several rowboats, the men reached out for a guard rail. They pulled up a cover, and warm air hit their faces. In the pitch dark below, they could hear snoring; as they made their way in, the embers of cigarettes lit up a few faces. They stopped short in front of one of them, as if they were surprised to see him, and knelt down before him. This man was tall, tall as a corpse. His face was white and in the light of his glowing cigarette it was like a painting made of broken glass. He sucked in on his cigarette and then stubbed it out.
“Idris. Hey, Idris!”
Yawning on his bed, the man looked around. His voice was soft and calm.
“Who are you? Why are you here?”
“Get up, Idris. It’s me … Ömer.”
“Who’s that next to you?”
“Who do you think? It’s Mavro.”
“Oh, Mavro, is it? What’s up?”
“What do you think? We have work to do.”
“What work?”
“Nightwork, you fool!”
The tall man searched for his shoes. The damp of the night came through the open hole that they now slowly climbed through. After jumping again from rowboat to rowboat, they reached the muddy shore. Here Ömer asked for the time.
Someone said, “It’s half past eleven.”
They began to walk. Everything was shut, and all they could hear were the whistles of the night watchmen and the indistinct rustlings of night, and ghostly footsteps.
They arrived at an all-night coffeehouse. From the outside it looked as if it were lit by a gas lamp, but there was just the one twenty-five watt light bulb, and the people inside could barely see each other. But once inside, the overwhelming stench of misery needed no illumination.
“Ali! Hello!”
In a Persian accent, someone said, “Ömer Ağa! How good to see you!”
“Fine, then. Three teas for us, if it’s fresh. Where is the simit seller?”
“He’ll be back any minute. My tea is freshly brewed.”
Two tiny naked creatures were asleep on the sofa. Even in the darkness, you could see that they weren’t covered, and though the coffeehouse was warm, they were shivering. Ömer stepped over to these creatures; in the darkness he could only see their noses, which were as small as watermelon seeds.
“So what are these, Ali?”
Ali went to Ömer’s side, his face stricken.
“Street children, the poor things. We had to take them in. What else could we do?”
Ömer turned around to look Ali straight in the eye. Then with his giant hands he tugged the rug off the wall.
“So that you don’t pity them free of charge,” he said. “Throw this rag over them. Can’t you see they’re going to freeze?”
Once covered with the rug, the little boys burrowed into it without waking. Turning around to hug each other, they sank into the deep sleep of childhood.
In front of the stove was an opium addict who made his living selling fish off the end of the bridge. He was silent, lost in his dreams. Fish, huge fish, each one as big as a monster, seaweed that made their lures sparkle beneath the green sea, a caique laden with harbor prawns, mermaids, whelks as big as giants …
Next to him was a dark-eyed child of fourteen or fifteen. His curly hair was blacker than black. He wasn’t sleeping, he was staring at the embers of his cigarette. Ömer went over to sit next to him. The others sank into chairs and were soon half asleep.
Then there was a little incident, so small that it disturbed neither the silence in the coffeehouse nor the sleeping opium addict. Springing to his feet, in his hand the switchblade he’d taken from the palms of another, Ömer cried, in a voice as calm as it was assured:
“We were just joking, Karayel! We were just joking!”
The child sitting next to him took in a breath, as deep as the sea. He spoke like the wind.
“I can’t take jokes like that, Brother Ömer. For jokes like that, I’ve thrown seven knives. And seven knives have come back.”
In his strange Black Sea accent, the swarthy boy kept talking about his lowly, coarse, deceitful deed. Ömer looked at him with a surprised smile.
“It was a joke. A joke! Karayel. Don’t I know you? Ali, go make us another four teas. And go find the simit seller and bring him back.”
Ömer had a hard time persuading the boy that it was all a joke. But now they were four people, sitting together in a huddle. Four people speaking in whispers too low for anyone else to hear. Until Mavro raised his voice to say to the one next to him:
“So there you have it. Just the boy we were looking for. He’ll know what he’s doing, too. All he has to do is give us one quick whistle.”
Then there was more whispering, again loud enough to hear. When Ali came back from looking for the simit seller, he found them on their feet. Biting into their warm simits as they stepped into the street, they vanished into the night.
Who Cares?
Seen from below, the house up on the hill seemed perfect. It was the sort of house that a grocer or a businessman or a rake might dream about during his youth, or a retired teacher or a novelist, churning out great works — the sort of house where an exiled politician might wish, in vain, to end his days.
It opened onto a road that almost looked as if it had been created by the fallen rocks themselves. On a Sunday you might see a courting couple or two, but on other days, it seemed to recede into itself, affecting that odd anonymity that is not unique to roads. There are a few islanders who like to come this way, but even they prefer to walk the road after dark, to watch the stars — or so it seems to me.
On one side of the road is the least visited part of the island: a place where the pine trees grow into each other. There’s no room even for a path. That’s why you find no naughty lipstick-soiled handkerchiefs under the pine trees, or newsprint, or sardine cans. On the other side of the road is what seems from a distance to be a beautiful house: on closer inspection it turns out to be two ugly houses. Both sit on the side of the road, hemmed in on all other sides by the forest.
From a distance you might think that those dwelling inside these houses had come to fulfill dreams of living happily ever after, smelling the pines and the north wind, or that they had come to sell chickpeas or lull themselves to sleep under a pine tree, dreaming of a nation free of pines and all else, but no one beyond chickpea sellers seemed to know. That’s how quietly they lived in these houses. In winter, when the village barber saw a sallow-faced man in his middle years running toward the ferry just as it arrived, he would turn to his customer and say, “That’s the old man who lives in the house on the hill.” What gossip they had all came from this. The old man would return with his arms full of small parcels and then he wouldn’t come down for weeks. And the island’s year-round inhabitants below would engage in their usual gossip and backbiting, until the fishermen came from the Black Sea and they stopped; instead they would try to rent out their rooms to them, on the sly. Unless it was rented on the sly, it could not be rented in the summer to visitors coming to the island to relax and swim in the sea. Because fishermen are bachelors. Bachelors, and also fishermen … True or not, fishermen’s shirts were said to be infested with lice.