The Aziz Bey Incident. Ayfer Tunc
home the clients of the night before was preparing for its new patrons.
Aziz Bey looked around; there was a lack of feeling inside him. A little later a well-built Arab, moustache and hair sparkling with brilliantine, wearing a pin-striped suit and waistcoat appeared along with a few well-fed men. Pointing here and there, he was giving some orders in a loud voice in words that were a mixture of Arabic and French. He was attentive, he was firm. When he saw the clerk his face softened. They embraced and began to talk immediately in loud voices, laughing heartily from time to time.
Aziz Bey had shrunk terribly, he had crumbled. His shoulders had fallen, his head was spinning slightly. He thought he was melting in the shadow of this huge Arab. He swayed. At that moment he felt the clerk’s hand on his shoulder. Both looked at Aziz Bey and began to speak. The clerk’s face revealed his respect for, and praise of, Aziz Bey, but at that moment Aziz Bey failed to understand this; he was too alone and estranged from everything to understand and be happy. The Arab took a cigarette from his case and lit it and his signet ring dazzled Aziz Bey for a moment. He addressed Aziz Bey with a pleasant expression on his face. He made rapid movements in the air with his large-fingered hands as if he wanted to explain something.
But Aziz Bey, a cock crowing in his own dunghill, a lion in his own neighbourhood, clever, proud, even conceited, did not understand a word of what the two men were saying. He just looked. Finally the clerk could not stand it, took the tambur and thrust it into Aziz Bey’s hands. It was then Aziz Bey under - stood that they were asking him to play. The clerk pulled up a chair, Aziz Bey sat down and began to play the tambur that had been placed between his knees.
The heart is tired now of shedding tears with your love.
Because there are no tears left in the eye, it has sobered with patience now…
He shut his eyes tightly to stop the tears falling. In spite of his hands trembling and his voice sounding tearful, the Arab smiled with pleasure and the clerk was looking at Aziz Bey with a broad, stupidly naïve smile, as if taking pride in this work of art. The song ended, the big burly Arab patted Aziz Bey on the back patronisingly, as if praising a child who had memorised his times tables well. He smiled and left saying a multitude of words to the clerk. The clerk took Aziz Bey by the hand, brought him over to a corner and seated him down, then disappeared under the gloomy lights.
Aziz Bey was alone, helpless and melancholy. He was tearful. His hand, still grasping the tambur tightly, was sweaty. He was such a stranger to everything, he could not find even a tiny clue to help him understand his state. He could not even think of a face-saving interpretation to enable him to sit up straight on the burgundy velvet chair. His face was as sad as a child who had lost his mother in a crowd and was waiting for her to find him. No doubt if he had seen this childish, tearful, deprived expression, that pitiful state would never have been erased from his memory, and his relatively short life would have been even more brief. But luckily there was not enough light for him to see himself in the broken mirrors that covered the columns from top to toe.
A little later, a waiter left a tray on the coffee table in front of him. Two round flat loaves, a few meatballs and a little green salad. Aziz Bey did not even consider it an offering made out of pity for a poor stranger. Yet although he was fainting with hunger, he ate the food unhurriedly, ridding his mind of any thought of pride. A few hours later, the lights of this vulgar place glitz brightened, and the tables began to fill up. Aziz Bey was lost in contemplation of these sweaty, noisy men of this baking hot land, happy in their own world.
While he was watching them swallowing the drink they had poured into small glasses, watching their smiles, their hearty laughter, and their constant embracing of their long haired, tired women with greasy-looking complexions, he heard a sentence right in his ear.
‘You are the one from Turkey?’
He started. A slim, handsome young man with a very thin moustache stood smiling in front of him. They were about the same age. While Aziz Bey was searching his mind for an explanation for this scene the young man had already drawn up a chair and sat next to him.
‘So a tambur? And one with a bow too.’
An excited delight appeared on Aziz Bey’s face. The deepened, hardened lines that had formed, and resembled a dried corpse in the desert, softened and he smiled.
‘With a bow…’ he said ‘Left by my grandfather…’
The eyes of the Armenian filled as he put out his hand and touched the tambur. He looked at Aziz Bey. It was as if he was not looking at a poor foreigner far from his homeland, but at a souvenir of Istanbul. An inappeasable longing appeared on his face.
‘What part of Istanbul are you from?’ he asked.
‘From Samatya. Do you know it?’
‘Don’t I just? It’s near our place. I’m from Kumkapı… My name’s Toros.’
With these words that fatal foreignness in Aziz Bey blew away and vanished like cigarette smoke slowly escaping from an open window; he relaxed. It was not as if they were seeing each other for the first time, but were two childhood friends that had grown up in the same street.
The sweat-bathed musicians had taken a break from enter -taining the merrily sizzled patrons in that complicated language with its strange intonation and unaccustomed melody. Now, there was a loud hum all around. While the Arab boss wandered among the customers with an attentive look, the waiters carried mezes and drinks on large trays to the tables, from which bursts of laughter, belches, misty guttural words, startling shouts mingled together, and a careless vibrancy carried on heedlessly. Aziz Bey and Toros – who’d fled from Turkey for a crime he had committed six years earlier – stared at and talked to each other non-stop, in a mood in complete contrast to the others. At that moment, homesickness had bound them together, as though making them blood brothers. They had a feeling of humiliated partnership brought about by having walked the same streets, boarded the same trains, cat-called at the same girls, and sworn with the same words.
‘Are they still eating blue fish?’ asked Toros. ‘It’s been six years since I’ve tasted an Istanbul blue fish.’
That night, Aziz Bey started to play in the tavern of Toros from Istanbul, where Armenians who had emigrated from Turkey regularly went, occasionally bringing with them large bosomed, long-legged, pale-skinned Arab Christian girls in low-cut dresses, young enough to be called children. It was poorer and less showy than the Arab’s tavern. But it was tremendously exciting. The patrons attacked Aziz Bey’s music like a glass of water.
Even if the music in the tavern awoke in Aziz Bey’s soul a state to be pitied, a feeling of being an orphaned child; singing songs about Istanbul reinforced the longing he felt for the city and increased his desire to stay alive and return to his country. There came a moment when he forgot that there were thousands of kilometres between him and his beloved city and when he went outside he thought that he would find himself in the rough cobbled streets of Samatya, where a strong sea wind blowing would carry the smell of seaweed to his nostrils and if he listened carefully to the silence of the city he would hear small ripples beating very softly against the shore.
*
Many years later, after Aziz Bey had really become Aziz Bey, one night when he was alone, he had sat down and made an account of his life, and written about the first night he played in Toros’ tavern in both columns. Toros was the only person in Aziz Bey’s life to whom he felt both great gratitude and whom he would have preferred never to have met. It was Toros who had appeared suddenly in front of him just at a moment when all his hopes were exhausted, had prevented Aziz Bey from falling from the threshold of misery into the darkness of non-existence.
Yet it was the offer made that night by the same Toros that marked the route he was to take for the rest of his life. It was still the same Toros who was the instigator of his taking the step into this unappreciative, ungrateful, disloyal profession, entertaining drunks whose souls changed like their faces as the bottles emptied. Drunks who did not know how to behave, but went on crying, shouting, vomiting, laughing or becoming aggressive. This way, he became content with whatever tips this noisy, worthless