A Useless Man Read Free

steam of warm buffalo’s milk on my face even as the morning mist swirled in to chill my cheeks, and I could still feel the lips of the old woman on my forehead, and the thick fingers of my brother Emin still joined with mine.
    For a very long time, I was able to preserve that moment. Then the paper yellowed like a picture postcard, and the image faded.

The Silk Handkerchief

    Moonlight shimmered across the silk factory’s long façade. Here and there I could see people hurrying alongside it. But there was nowhere I wished to go. I was making my way out, very slowly, when I heard the watchman call out to me.
    “Where are you off to?”
    “I’m just going for a stroll,” I said.
    “Don’t you want to see the acrobat?”
    I hesitated, so he went on:
    “Everyone’s going. This is the first time anyone like him has ever come to Bursa.”
    “I’m not interested,” I said.
    He begged and groveled until I agreed to take his shift. For a while I just sat there. I smoked a cigarette. I sang an old folk song. But soon I was bored. I might as well stretch my legs, I thought. So I picked up the watchman’s studded nightstick and went off to do the rounds.
    I had just passed the girls’ workshop when I heard a noise. Taking out my flashlight, I made a sweep of the room. And there, racing along the carpet of light, were two naked feet.
    After I had caught the thief, I took him to the watchman’s room, to get a good look at him in the lamp’s yellow glow.
    How tiny he was! When I squeezed his small hand in mine, I thought it might break. But his eyes, how they flashed.
    I laughed so hard I let go of his hand.
    Then he lunged at me with a pocketknife, slicing my pinkie. So I got a tight grip on the little devil and went through his pockets: some contraband tobacco and a few papers of the same sort, and a handkerchief that was almost clean. I dabbed some of his tobacco on the wound, tore a strip from the handkerchief and wrapped it around my finger. With the remaining tobacco we rolled two fat cigarettes and then sat down like two old friends and talked.
    He was just fifteen. From which I was to understand that he was new to this business, he was just a boy. You know the story – someone had asked him for a silk handkerchief – a girl he loved, a girl he had his eye on, the girl next door. He couldn’t just go out and buy one, he had no money. So after thinking the matter through, he’d decided on this.
    “That’s fine and good,” I said. “But the workshops are on this side of the building. What was it that took you to the other side?”
    He smiled. How could he have known which side the workshops were on?
    We lit up two of my village cigarettes. By now we were good friends.
    He was Bursa born and raised. He had never been to Istanbul – only once in his life had he even been as far as Mudanya. And, oh! To see the look on his face when he told me all this …
    As a boy in Emir Sultan, I would often go sledding on moonlit nights, and this boy reminded me of the friends I had made there.
    I could imagine his skin going as dark as theirs in the summer. As dark as the water in the Gökdere pools we could hear bubbling in the distance. As dark as the pits of summer fruit.
    I looked at him more closely: His olive skin was as dark as a walnut fresh from its green shell. His teeth were as fine and white as the flesh inside. In summer, and right through to the end of walnut season, boys’ hands smell only of peaches and plums in this place and their chests give off the aroma of hazel leaves as they roam the streets half-naked in their buttonless striped shirts.
    Just then the watchman’s clock struck twelve; the acrobat’s show was nearly over.
    “I should get going,” the boy said.
    I was just regretting having sent him on his way without a silk handkerchief when I heard a commotion right outside the door, and the watchman came in muttering under his breath, dragging the thief back in with him.
    This time I held him