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 in front of the window (she had left work because her boss had gone bankrupt), none of this would have befallen him.
But what had befallen him? It was just a love gone wrong; that is all. Whose life doesn’t contain an unhappy love story? However, Aziz Bey’s unhappy love story permeated his whole life like a road of no return, an illness that somehow never got better. As Aziz Bey tried to catch the mistake, he walked towards the mistake as though walking towards a yellow leaf that the wind continually blew in front of him, he just could not catch it.
Whenever he thought about Maryam he felt a sweet coolness on his tongue. A feeling tasting of peppermint roamed inside him. Then a long lasting bitterness would take its place. He always avoided remembering the time preceding this love, the moments of indecisiveness whether or not to begin, those most delectable moments, the dreamiest stage. In fact he was right to want to forget. As he remembered, he remembered how his life had changed its course and how he had been crushed under the load of a weighty misconception.
Furthermore, in the beginning theirs too was a love like everyone else’s. But fate obstructed it from progressing like every -one else’s. From chance meetings, ostensibly returning from the market as he left work; bashful smiles as their eyes met; the dropping of notes with meeting places written on them; they progressed to brief meetings out of sight that in time became longer. Kissing, making love… Cinemas were visited, boxes reserved; there was swimming at Kilyos; caramelised milk puddings eaten at pudding shops with marble tables. The house was left with little lies. Loitering in vain in front of post offices when the other couldn’t leave the house…
It would have been all right if it had carried on like this.
If Maryam’s family had not decided to go to Beirut in search of a living, this everyday love would have