day, the poor woman managed each time to take the tambur away from him and hide it just before his father was due home. When Aziz Bey had grown a little older the tambur quietly passed from his mother and father’s room to his own.
Aziz Bey’s father was ill tempered; even if there were any delicate feelings chiselled deeply into his soul, he would not let anyone see them. His wife put up with a lot from him. The permanent frown, a fist continually brought down on the table because the food was salty, the shirt not ironed, the bread was stale; the bass voice reproving at every opportunity... But still, at night when all was quiet, when he was boozing on his balcony that almost glimpsed the sea from the slopes of Samatya, his face revealed an unexplained sadness, and he would hum those old, delicate songs that were in his head,
Who graces your beautiful rose gardenWho pleads kissing your feet…
Aziz Bey would contend his father hadn’t been able marry his true love. Not true. As Aziz Bey had written himself, he had also rewritten his father and his grandfather. There were times when he rewrote a whole lifetime. And he ended up believing it all. After his father was dead and gone, when total loneliness had finally replaced the resentment he felt, he gave his father the benefit of having finer feelings imprisoned in a corner of his heart. In actual fact, his father had married his mother out of love, but was always burdened by life, always struggling to stand upright. Instead of being a downtrodden, submissive child like his extremely sensitive and continually oppressed father, he wanted to be as hard as stone and aloof. That’s all there was to it.
As for Aziz Bey, he was a mixture of his grandfather and father; both sensitive and emotional, and yet stubborn and headstrong. And since two proud tightrope walkers tried to walk the same rope, he was in constant strife with his father. His father, a clerk at the courthouse, who shaved even on Sunday mornings and who wouldn’t step into the street without a hat, wanted his son to study to be a judge, a prosecutor, or something of the sort, but Aziz Bey was always too frivolous. Dark covered books, frowning teachers, and classrooms with windows painted halfway with grey gloss paint distressed him. Wherever there was a useless, entertaining, fleeting job he went after it. He went on kicking a ball around football pitches until his leg was injured. For a few consecutive years he was a lifeguard at the Florya beach; he liked the appreciative looks of the girls who came to the beach in convertible cars. When he developed a passion for driving, he worked a shared taxi on the Bakırköy-Taksim line. He spent the few piasters he earned at taverns and brothels. Whatever his father did, he did not study; it was his father who gave in first.
But these were teenage years, which always pass so quickly, and so did. His father retired, he began to spend the remainder of his colourless life between home and the coffee house. He suddenly went into decline. He was not able to remember the names of his friends or keep track of things. He owed money everywhere. As he sank into debt his worry and his anger grew. Aziz Bey had just come back from military service; he realised then that fleeting jobs wouldn’t earn you a decent crust; one had to hold down a proper job. He was a good-looking lad with a smooth tongue, and his father had a wide circle of friends, so he joined a firm trading in gravel. His mother and father, seeing that he got up early and went to work and returned home in the evening at the right time, began to cultivate hopes that their son would grow up and become responsible. However, this routine did not last for long. As he began to work head down, shoulders stooped saying, ‘Yes sir, no sir,’ in this gloomy, low-ceilinged office smelling of sweat, tar and onions, with its two small windows looking out onto dark heaps of sand, it began to hit Aziz Bey’s day-dreamy head what a hard struggle life really was. On Sunday mornings, when his father was not at home and he tried moaning to his mother, his mother always used to respond, ‘Perseverance my son, perseverance…’ He certainly was not going to persevere. But it went against the grain to ask for pocket money from his aloof, obstinate, white-haired father. Even if he didn’t persevere he worked patiently through the day, longing impatiently for the evenings.
It was at that time he began to frequent the taverns that opened wide the windows of his expansive soul, and that thrilled his insides as he touched the strings of his musical instrument. He was still on bad terms with his father. They did not even have dinner together any more. As soon as Aziz Bey left work he’d go to the tavern where his tambur would be waiting for him, have a table set with rakı and meze and would sing, accompanying his older musician friends,
Even if you pale and fade you are still a rose-pink mouthIf God should have a blessing for me that’s you.
He’d smile thinking of Maryam, convinced by now she was standing and waiting by the window as he passed her door every morning, and believing that he’d found the love he was looking for, since every glimpse of her shook him as if he had been slapped.
Aziz Bey’s tragedy begins with Maryam: simply because he fell in love with her. This love like a blind eye, a paralysed right arm, a heart missing a beat, always gave him pain but lived on with him.
It would have been all right if only he had been able to think of Maryam as one of those broad-bosomed, teary-eyed women on the list he kept when he was a teenager. It would have been all right if it were just a sexual desire that had stirred inside him, if he had looked at Maryam’s body as fresh as a sapling hastening to grow, as a very thirsty person looks at a frosty glass of water, if he had just been content to desire that body. But Aziz Bey looked into Maryam’s eyes. That eyes were dangerous, he under -stood only after Maryam. If he had not kept thinking about her eyes that spoke, if he had not flushed to the tips of his toes when he saw her, if his knees had not shaken, his tongue had not stuck to the roof of his mouth, Aziz Bey would have been a man like everyone else.
What would have happened if he had been a man like everyone else? Nothing… But perhaps he would have lived longer. Perhaps he would have aged by rotting gradually, become bent and would have forgotten the song, Months pass and I’m still waiting for you to come. He would have married a woman who talked incessantly and grew fatter by the day. He would have left that semblance of an office and joined a largeish firm. He would have earned more money, each month he would have got hold of pen and paper and drawn up long accounts and each time decided to give up smoking. He would have had twin boys whose heads he would have clipped for always breaking windows playing ball, and whom he would have wanted to study to be a prosecutor or a judge, or perhaps he would have had a girl. He would then learn that his daughter had slept with all the young lads in the neighbourhood, and this would have caused him great anguish. However, he would have been so entangled with life that he would pretend he didn’t know. Feigning ignorance would not offend him; he would not question why it had not offended.
If it had not been for that touching thing he thought he had caught in Maryam’s eyes, that dripped like a bitter draught into his heart, Aziz Bey would have died one day slumped over a steel desk with a sheet of glass cut for the top, filling in the same old ledgers, because life would have ordered him to work on, even though he should have retired long ago.
And so he would have lived a life like everyone else.
But that’s not what happened after Maryam. Aziz Bey, who was spoiled by the appreciation of women whom he scorned, was transfixed one day by Maryam’s black eyes, deep as a well, looking out from behind a net curtain. ‘I was as good as bewitched’ was how he described that unforgettable moment to those who at the time he was very close to, most of whom are now no longer alive. It was as though what he experienced at that moment was not love but a divine call. What he saw was not a pair of eyes but the first sign of a strange destiny calling him to a warm but dark and mysterious world. That this world was poisonous, he realised much later.
And yet, it’s impossible to rule out the role fate in his story. If he had not worked in that office, if the way to the office had not passed in front of Maryam’s house, if Maryam’s family had not lived on the ground floor of that shabby apartment, if that pair of well-like eyes that he had fallen in love with had not been at home all day sitting
