The expected happened at the end of a day when he was lost in thought over Maryam’s letters and postcards; he was fired. Hearing this, his father kicked him out of the house in order to knock some sense into this son whose lovelorn state had lost its charm. Actually, his intention was to leave Aziz Bey outside long enough to learn his lesson and so teach by experience just what life was all about. His own father had failed to do that, leaving his son lost in a moderate and harmonious world: and hadn’t that been the best thing to do? If he had been more of a disciplinarian, taken an interest in everything, in his son and daughter, if he had forced them to study, to grow into responsible people, would he have spent his life going to and fro between a run-down house and a run-down bureau?
The idea and the deed meant well was naïve. But what his father couldn’t have predicted was where it would lead.
His father was sitting in the coffee house playing rummy when, with still two hours until the end of the workday, Aziz Bey went sauntering past. He was still dressed up to the nines, but despite his neat and pressed clothes, there was something dishevelled in his manner and air, something flighty. He had taken off his tie and put it in his pocket. In this state that handsome youth looked like an idle child who had skipped school. He walked rolling a stone over and over with his foot as if life were just a carefree, light-hearted, merry game; he looked as though he couldn’t care less about what happened tomorrow.
His father grasped it at once. It was obvious that this was going to happen. He paled and his lips trembled. He asked the coffee house owner for a glass of water. He sipped the water down. Despite his plight he sat in the coffee house until evening, abandoned the game he was playing and thought about his son who, although a fully-grown man, was still frivolous; and this made him grow angry. He returned home at his usual time to find his son lying on the couch reading a newspaper and not looking particularly upset at being fired. He was taken aback.
He imagined that his son would stand in front of him at least a bit crestfallen, looking troubled, and find some excuse, however feeble, for being fired. He gave a little cough, bent his head and found an unaccustomed tone for his voice. He sat in his armchair in a way that was neither as harsh as usual nor as mild as not to be expected of him.
‘Why did you come home from work early?’ he asked.
Aziz Bey shook his shoulders indifferently while turning the page of the newspaper he was reading.
‘I was fired…’ he said.
This statement, that issued from Aziz Bey’s mouth calmly and naturally as though it were the most normal thing, immediately strained the atmosphere in the house. His father drew a deep breath and began to speak, growing angrier, with his voice rending as his anger grew. He said whatever came to his mind, whatever was on his tongue. As he shouted sentences full of insult at Aziz Bey, his mother became more anguished and looked from her son to her husband as if tongue-tied. There was an indescribable sadness in her face. At every biting word she shuddered as if she’d been punched, and shut her eyes tightly.
Aziz Bey was branded a rogue, a beggar and a good-for-nothing. Insulting sentences verging on curses reverberated round the walls of the room; yet a joy as light as an egg white that froths the more it is whisked, unexpectedly began to form inside Aziz Bey. The father, unaware of the letters calling his son to a hot country scented with a mingling of smells of spices, flowers and lemon, finally booted him out of the house. He told him that he was only fit for common brothels and the filthy streets.
‘Don’t stand there any longer soiling this decent and honourable house!’ he said, ‘Get lost!…’
At that point, his mother had covered her face with her hands. Aziz Bey quickly left the room and went to his own room. He filled the case that he had put on his bed and had looked at for days but somehow had not had the courage to fill, he, took his tambur and left. He had intended to say goodbye to his mother, but at the door he met his father.
‘Are you still here?’ said his father. ‘Haven’t you fucked off yet?’
Tears sprang to Aziz Bey’s eyes and he flushed. He looked at his father bitterly, and slammed the door with such force that the glass decorated with ironwork in a tulip design fell out with a crash. At that point, his mother, whose heart had been beating abnormally fast since the beginning of the quarrel, collapsed on the floor, no longer able to stand the burden of this disaster.
Aziz Bey, not even considering what he had left behind, was ready to embark, full of desire and strength, on a journey to a brand new home where his sweetheart awaited. As he left the house with rapid steps, he could feel his father’s eyes boring into the back of his head. It was as though he feared that his father would seize him by the shoulder with his strong fingers and bring him back to that deadly captivity, just when he was hurrying to reach the freedom he sought in faraway places and leave behind this neighbourhood, where he had been born and had grown up. As he went to the port seeking a ship to take him to a new life promising him riches, love and happiness, his father had taken his ailing mother in his arms, helped her into a taxi and was trying to reach the hospital in time, swearing on the way that he would never forgive his only and ungrateful son, and filled with a resentment so deeply rooted that it would never ever be eradicated.
There were ships in the port that day, but that the one destined for Aziz Bey was still waiting to weigh anchor twenty days later. After Maryam had written, ‘You, too, should come…’ he had secretly obtained a passport and inquired into travel by train and boat. As soon as he left home, his first job was to go to the port and stare hungrily at the ships that were to take him to his new homeland.
For 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