twenty days, he slept in different people’s houses, stayed up all night in his regular taverns and killed time in the coffee houses. He avoided his own neighbourhood throughout. He went round to see his friends, said goodbye, telling them about his wonderful dreams as though they would surely materialise. Because his wasteful palms did not know how to hang on to money, he had not saved the necessary funds for his journey. He borrowed from here and there. He did not even call on his beloved aunt lest she try to reconcile him with his father. He talked to manning agents who recruited seamen and finally boarded a dry goods ship on the condition that he worked his passage.
As he recalled the image of his mother whom he had left behind, he waved his hand like chasing away flies; he wanted to drive away this image that wrenched his insides. Finally he reached the blue and white city so bright it dazzled the eye, far hotter than described in Maryam’s letters.
Those three happy days that he happened to be thinking about, sitting in front of the window looking at the moonlight reflected in the Golden Horn on the night of that tragic incident, constituted just a short fragment of this long period.
During the daytime, he did the heavy work shown to him by the expressionless seamen who were as hard as stone with skins leathered by a windy heat. At night, he played the tambur to allay the longing a little. Then he lay on the tarpaulin on the deck of the ship that rocked like a cradle over the foaming waters of the moonlight Mediterranean, thinking of the moment when he would meet Maryam again. What would Maryam be doing? What would she say when she saw him? Would she be at a loss for words? Would she jump into his arms for joy?
Sadly, he realised much later that he had thought about all this for nights on end in vain. Because the first moment of that meeting with Maryam who, as she had related in her letters, was working as an assistant in her uncle Artin’s shop, was extremely subdued, passionless, and even cold.
Yet neither was culpable for the cold and emotionless nature of that reunion both had so longed for. For a start, Maryam had written ‘come!’ on wafer-thin pink paper only after lying in her bed towards morning, exhausted from dealing with furs that burnt her arms and legs like pepper all day long in the city scorched by the sun. She had never considered that Aziz Bey really would be able to get up and come, and harboured a notion that this love, whose existence she found very romantic, would remain a childish poetic game played with letters.
That was the reason she had not been able to believe her eyes when she first saw Aziz Bey, who was thoroughly burnt by the sun while washing the decks during the journey and was in a pitiful and downtrodden state brought about by being in a strange country with no knowledge of the language or place. Furthermore, in place of the strong, protective, decisive young man she knew as Aziz Bey, rough even in his love, here was a poor creature, bewildered and lost like a puppy thrown out of home.
As for Aziz Bey; he was unaware of his distraught and timid demeanour. He had, however, kept his self confident, dignified bearing until the vessel docked; he had held his head high with frequent thoughts of Maryam. During the journey he had such a persuasive manner convincing those around him that he had a strong personality, that he had even impressed the sailors who had turned to stone from being all alone on the open sea. These steely-eyed, sharp-featured and callous sailors, who looked on the verge of cutting one another’s throats, could not refrain from swallowing before they ordered him to task.
But this proud manner that had permeated Aziz Bey’s body, his looks, and his bearing vanished in a trice in front of the fatal feeling of foreignness he experienced as soon as he put foot on land. His shoulders drooped and an inexplicable timidity settled in his eyes. He was rendered totally wretched by a deep regret when faced with the police who pushed and shoved him, speaking with strange, misty words and loud voices and looking at great length first at his passport and then his face. When he left Customs and held out the paper with the address to find Maryam to the taxi driver, he was really frightened of the days that awaited him. That was the reason Maryam was confronted not by an Aziz Bey whose look defied at the world, but by a crestfallen Aziz Bey ready to bow to any game fate would play with him.
Thank goodness this cool, subdued and strange moment of reencounter did not last very long.
Would it have been better for Aziz Bey if it had lasted? If it had happened in a different way: if Maryam had given Aziz Bey the cold shoulder, if she had said, ‘Just because I said come, it didn’t have to be at once,’ would Aziz Bey have gone straight back? Who knows? And then, what kind of Aziz Bey would have lived in the streets of Istanbul, it is not possible to predict.
And that’s not how it happened. After a few pointless questions, asked through her confusion, she realised that she had a lover passionate enough to leave his country for her, and the soft and happy expression given to her face by this treasure lasted a whole three days.
Luckily at that time they were alone in the shop. Maryam’s father, uncle and cousins were all in the workshop. And it was lunch time to boot. As the childish surprise on Aziz Bey’s face began to fade, Maryam looked around her. It was as though the city had melted under the heat, people had fled to shady corners like insects. Maryam, seeing no one about, embraced her passionate and faithful lover and kissed him on lips that were dried and cracked by the sun.
And it was this that destroyed Aziz Bey.
That passionate kiss they enjoyed the first day in the lunch break in the dim shop subsequently came as a big shock to Aziz Bey. He was not able to explain to himself how the girl who kissed him so passionately and who went around drunk with love for three days could change so much in one day. It was quite simple, however. For Maryam the only important thing was the existence of such a lover. It was not important whether it was Aziz Bey or someone else. So because Aziz Bey would never be willing to accept this explanation, he never even considered its validity. He looked for other reasons and he could not find any.
After looking long and deeply into Maryam’s black eyes that he had missed so much, after caressing her slim white neck, they left the shop, Maryam in front and Aziz Bey behind. Although it was well after midday the sun was too hot to bear; Aziz Bey thought he would go blind from so much light. The paradise he dreamed of was much hotter than he expected and very alien too. Maryam led him round a whole lot of streets: some narrow, some wide, some shady, and some strong smelling, their colours intermingled and cloudy, then decomposing again; hoarse voices, whispers, calls, bursts of laughter, blended with interjections; where huge moustached men slept snoring in the shade. When she finished the journey, they were in front of a small, mean hotel. Speaking in the broken words of a misty language, she took the key to Aziz Bey’s room and with confident steps took him upstairs, as though she knew the way. The room was so hot that Aziz Bey thought the walls would melt and run. Maryam closed the shutters of this small, dirty room, and the sweet gloom that enveloped the inside stopped the pain in Aziz Bey’s eyes.
Maryam came to the hotel every lunch break over those unfor -gettable three days that remained engraved in Aziz Bey’s mind. The image of the passion they enjoyed in the space of time so much longer than a long lunch break still seemed very short to Aziz Bey as the details were seared into his mind. His whole life was spent striving to tear, eradicate, scrape that image from his brain; he did not succeed. He was never able to remove this error from his being. For this reason, he lived an unhappy and irritable life; mostly angry, but sometimes as aggrieved as a motherless child.
Aziz Bey always believed he had been deceived by Maryam. Yet, if one discounted the sincere appeals in Maryam’s letters, one could hardly describe what he experienced as deception. In truth, Aziz Bey had fallen into the mistake of believing he was loved. This was all.
He spent the Maryam-less hours of these three days scarcely able to contain himself, waiting for her to come. On the fourth day, Maryam did not come. Aziz Bey was frantic. He wandered along the corridors of the hotel, he sat in the lobby, he went outside the front door. Lunch break ended, the sun bowed
