in its faded black case.
The street was orphaned.
Bahri the clarinettist contends what took place that night in Zeki’s tavern was a tragic incident. Far better for it not to have happened. Zeki went too far. Of course he was right, but he should not have manhandled Aziz Bey. On the night of the incident, Bahri returned home, lay on his bed and pondered. He didn’t know what he thought and why, but he sensed Aziz Bey was different, and that ‘such a man never deserved such treatment.’ That night sleep escaped him; just as he was about to get up he found what he was looking for: it occurred to him that Aziz Bey was a dusty souvenir of the days when his musician companions counted among respected folk. That’s when he ached inside intensely. Bahri is someone who had seen those good old days; he knows the proper way to behave with good manners. He knows very well what loyalty means. If it were not for the memory of those days, he would lose the meaning of life completely.
Mercan the darbuka player, when asked what happened said, ‘I didn’t see, I don’t know, I was in the bog, whatever happened, happened then.’ He wasn’t in the bog or anything in actual fact, he simply didn’t care one way or the other. In fact, he had sort of seen what had happened, but said to himself, ‘Who cares?’ Mercan doesn’t have the soul of a fellow musician. As if the skilful hands that beat the darbuka were not his. His mouth may sing, If the end of this love affair is going to be painful,but his mind is elsewhere. The day he parks his minibus in front of his door he’ll bid farewell to his night-time partners. All he can think of is a blue minibus.
As for Davut the waiter: he saw everything, he knows it all. He’d been secretly anticipating this for days, after all. A nasty piece of work by nature, he’s treacherous, venomous, and loves trouble. Even with nothing untoward he says, ‘I can feel something bad is going to happen one of these days.’ He is innately evil. The one who speaks out of turn most and makes mountains out of molehills all over the place. He laughs with Zeki to his face, and dances attendance on him because he’s the boss; but when he feels that Zeki has passed from merrily tipsy to drunk, he fills a bag with bunches of bananas, blocks of cheese, lamb chops by the rack, and takes them straight home.
However much Zeki says about Aziz Bey, ‘I was right, I’d had it up to here, that pillock had buggered up the business!’ he has grown listless since that night; he looks on the verge of tears. Something inside he can’t pin down aches intensely. Some days he thinks it is his stomach that is aching, on others, his heart. He closes the tavern, goes home and sits in front of the window. He looks at the lights sliding like fireflies into the city’s night, trying to discern where Aziz Bey’s now extinguished light might once have burned, and asks his wife, ‘But was I wrong Mukadder?’ his eyes brimming, ‘Who’d do a thing like that?’
And all his wife replies, unthinkingly, is, ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Zeki, if I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a million times, of course you wuz right,’ stretched on the bed, her hair spread out on the pillow, lost in contemplation of the clinking of the gold bangles that cover her right wrist. But no amount of vindication can mollify him; the ache inside does not go away.
As if passing slowly into the sun’s shadow, like evening falling unnoticed, Aziz Bey passed from a bright, happy face to a sorrowful one. He acquired a sorrowful past. His nose was always in the air, his head held high. Even if he had not managed to live any other way, he realised that evening, while staring at the dirty waters of the Golden Horn, that in fact he had always made this assumption. Yet he had been gravely mistaken. And again, he realised his life had been nothing but one big misconception.
He went through the streets that resemble no others, where blood-shedding rage and maddening indifference, stone-hard pain and hysterical joy, tragic births and ridiculous deaths, venomous hatred and feeble love, cats and dogs, the crooked and the straight, white and black live together as brothers and sisters of the same parents but tear each other to pieces never -theless; streets that are too complicated to be understood by those of the respectable life façade, and that resemble a brief summary of the enigma called life. He went, he turned round and came back. His relatively short life was quickly spent on a speck of earth populated by those who fed on one another.
Without knowing all this who could know who was right, and who was wrong?
In actual fact, Aziz Bey should have been seen doing his tambur taqsim at the Palace Night Club in his black costume with purple satin collar and cuffs begun by a lachrymose tailor years earlier for a famous stage artist, but left unfinished when he went blind. Aziz Bey used to run from one nightclub to the other; running being a figure of speech. He never ran; more like he could barely keep up with the offers. He swaggered, his nose always in the air, his glance always on the horizon at a lofty point that no one could see. After a great deal of reluctance, he was good enough to oblige with his tambur those waiting patiently to hear his art. Producers would queue at his door during the Izmir Fair. Even if not the most important singers, the next most important ones used to phone Aziz Bey to ask him to back them, and if that didn’t work, they would ask through a mediator. He would leave them all waiting at his door. There was a spirit in his playing; his plucking of the tambur was extraordinary. It was like nectar to those who listened. And he’d always been grumpy, too. But he had such a compelling attitude and manner, and a look that said ‘I know what I’m doing’ that those very capricious singers with painted blue eyelids, teased blonde hair, flirting in sequins, tulle and feathers, swallowed their tongues in his presence.
The truth of the matter is that he never harboured a youthful passion to become a tambur player or anything like that. It was fate that pushed him down this path. At some point in his long and blurred story the tambur stuck to his hand. He was a little flighty, resembling a bird in spirit. He was a dapper lad too and quite handsome. He was constantly falling in love with married women nearing middle age with a penchant for escapades, with broad bosoms and wavy hair. His passion would quickly pass like a soft breeze springing up on summer evenings. Women would send him ridiculous letters wet with tears, written in an uneven scrawl full of clichéd sentences of passion. He would read and then discard them all, laughing as he read them.
He would meet and part from women over and over again under the acacia trees in country tea gardens with wooden chairs. Then? Then nothing... A pack of ladies’ cigarettes forgotten on the table was all that remained of almost every woman. After smoking the last cigarette in the forgotten pack, the woman would slip from his mind and disappear. He would not even remember the women he had left without even a backward glance. Those women would look out for his coming, go to the places where they had met and wait for him; they would keep thinking about him and shed tears at night in their beds: did he care? He expected such a passion from life, one that would suddenly hit him like a slap, stupefy him, paralyse him. A love that hit one like that was what Aziz Bey called ‘passion’. Becoming a tambur player was the last thing on his mind in those days…
His grandfather used to play a little, in actual fact. Not just a little, he played pretty well. He died before his time, and the tambur became a family keepsake. Aziz Bey’s father did not appreciate its value. Not that he’d ever cared to know what it was that permeated its strings. But even so, he didn’t have the heart to break and throw away this sole memento of his father; a man who spent his life not being able to say no to anyone, being pushed around, and taking refuge only in the tambur. He put this poor dejected musical instrument away on top of the cupboard.
When he was still just a bleary-eyed child with a runny nose who turned the house upside down, Aziz Bey found the dusty, forgotten tambur where it had been left, on top of the cupboard. After that he never put down this strange toy that was several times taller than himself.
Just for fun, he would keep scraping the bow across the strings. When she heard the tambur’s sad tone, his sorrowful mother, usually up to her elbows in water with washing soda, would call to her son in pathetic agitation. ‘For goodness sake son, put it back, don’t let your father see...’ Even though she
