THE
AZIZ BEY INCIDENT
AND OTHER STORIES
THE
AZIZ BEY INCIDENT
AND OTHER STORIES
Ayfer Tunç
Translated from the original Turkish by Stephanie Ateş
English-language edition first published in 2013 by
Istros Books
London, United Kingdom
© Ayfer Tunç, 2013
Translation © Stephanie Ateş, 2013
Edited by Feyza Howell and Susan Curtis-Kojaković
Cover image © Anthony Georgieff
Vagabond Media
The right of Ayfer Tunç to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1888
ISBN: 978-1-908236-11-1 (print edition)
ISBN: 978-1-908236-97-5 (eBook)
Typeset by Octavo Smith Ltd in Constantia 10/13
Printed in England by
CMP (UK), Poole, Dorset
This project has been funded with support from the TEDA Programme of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of Turkey.
CONTENTS
EDITOR’S NOTES
Turkish is phonetic, with a single sound assigned to most letters.
The consonants pronounced differently from English are:
c = j in jack
ç = ch in chat
j = French j in jour
s = s in sing
ş = sh in ship
ğ = ‘soft g’ is silent; it merely lengthens the vowel preceding it
r = r in read; at end of syllables closest to the Welsh, as in mawr
y = English y in yellow
The vowels are equally straightforward:
a = shorter than the English a in father
e = e in bed (never as in me)
but en = an as in ban
ı = schwa; the second syllable in higher
i = i in bin; never as in eye
ö and ü = like the corresponding German umlaut sounds
Given names usually are accented on the final syllable, so a-ZİZ, mer-YEM etc.
Honorifics popularly follow the first name: bey (sir), hanım (lady), abi (elder brother), and abla (elder sister), for instance.
Feyza Howell
A tragic event occurred at Zeki’s tavern one night. Zeki roughed up Aziz Bey and threw him out. No one could quite remember how it began and what happened, but everyone went around making far-fetched claims. Some said, ‘Zeki started it’; others objected, ‘No, Aziz Bey was as drunk as a skunk.’ Some found fault with the patrons, and others said, ‘It wasn’t worth blowing out of all proportion.’
A few hours after the incident, Aziz Bey went home. He sat for a while in the light of a blinking bulb that settled over the room like a grave illness, and with eyes brimming with tears that just could not fall, he looked at a shattered moonlight reflected in the dirty waters of the Golden Horn and frequently obscured by clouds. The last thing to pass through his mind was the memory of a very short, but very happy time: three days spent in a hot city, blue as far as the eye could see, shaded by palm trees, dates, and other, taller palms. That happiness suddenly changed to sorrow and this was reflected in his face. The sunken old face that had given up hiding the entire suffering of a lifetime full of mistakes seemed for a moment as if about to cry, and stayed that way.
There was no one to softly close his lustreless eyes in the hours that stretched towards the morning of that cold and rainy night. No one to open the fingers crossed over each other like a childishly peevish sign, no one to place his arms as light as a bird on either side. He had slumped into his armchair. The spirit suffering inside him drifted out. He had come to the end of a ruffled life that left a fond memory in very few hearts, and found peace.
It’s all over now. The streets stretch out like a giant awakening, and as night falls on the city the locals of those streets still miss him. Gafur the mussel seller asks Boğos the Agos-seller* about him, Boğos asks Tayfur the lottery agent, and Tayfur asks the hip amputee Ibo, who sells single cigarettes out of the pack. Even Dark Hacı, who sells prayer beads and fragrances on Ağa Mosque Street, looks for him with eyes whose whites are too bright. The locals of those streets miss Aziz Bey – whose secret sorrow they did not sense for years – swaggering down the street in his thread -bare stage costume with purple satin collar and cuffs, carrying his tambur 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,