A Useless Man Read Free Page A

by the ears, while the watchman whacked the soles of his feet with a willow switch. Good thing the boss wasn’t there. I swear he would have called the police. “Thieving at this age,” he’d have cried. “Well, the boy can smarten up in jail.”
    He looked scared by the time we were through with him – as if at any moment he might start crying. But he didn’t shed a tear. His lips didn’t tremble and his eyebrows hardly moved. There was only a faint fluttering of eyelashes.
    When we let him go he took off like a swallow, vanishing as if he were soaring over a moonlit cornfield.

    In those days I slept in the storeroom on the floor above the workshop. How beautiful that room was. And never more so than on moonlit nights.
    Just outside my window was a mulberry tree. Moonlight would come cascading down through its leaves, throwing flecks of light across the floor. Summer and winter I left the window open. The wind was never too rough or cold. I had worked on a ferryboat and I knew the different winds fromtheir smells – the
lodos
, the
poyraz
, the
karayel
, and the
günbatısı
. So many winds swept over me as I lay on that blanket, each one bringing its own strange dreams.
    I’m a light sleeper. It was just before daybreak when I heard a noise outside. Someone was in the tree, but I was too afraid to get up or cry out. A shadow appeared in the window.
    It was the boy. Slowly he dropped down into the room and when he passed me I shut my eyes. First he went through my cupboard. Then, very slowly, he went through the stockpile. I didn’t say a word. The truth is, even if he’d made off with everything, I could never have said a word in the face of such boldness. In the morning, the boss would beat the truth out of me. “Take that, you dog!” he’d say. He’d tell me a dead man could have done a better job, and then he’d fire me. I knew all this, but still I didn’t say a word.
    He slipped out through the window as quietly as he had come. Then I heard a snap. I rushed downstairs and found him lying in the moonlight, while the watchman and a few others looked on.
    He was dying. His fist was clenched. When the watchman pried it open, a silk handkerchief shot up from his hand, like water from a spring.
    Yes, that’s right. That’s what happens if a handkerchief is pure silk. Crumple it up as tight as you can. But open your hand, and it shoots right up, like water from a spring.

The Bohça

    I remember the first day she came to our house. I was sitting under the mulberry tree, telling the neighborhood boys about my day in the water. My voice was shaking as I described my adventures on the coast. My passionate report had them rooted to the spot; none of these boys knew how to swim. Their eyes brimmed with questions. But I was feverishly certain that I could read their thoughts so I didn’t give them a chance to say a thing.
    I heard someone calling to me from the garden gate. And there she was. To hide my surprise, I kept on talking.
    “Then I couldn’t touch the bottom. I was swallowing water. But I wasn’t at all scared. I was thinking of my next move.”
    “Young man, your mother wants to see you.”
    That’s what she said.
    “I’m coming,” I said.
    And I went right on telling my friends about how I nearly drowned while learning how to swim.
    After they had left, I turned back to the garden gate. She was still standing there waiting, but her eyes were on a finch that was singing in the quince tree.
    “Is that a nightingale?” she asked.
    “No, girl, that’s a finch.”
    She refused to believe me.
    “I’m nobody’s fool,” she said. “That finch already flew away.”
    She had a rough way of speaking.
    “Shut up, girl. Don’t you have any manners? Don’t joke like that.”
    She set her sad eyes on me and gave me a long, hard look.
    I went into the kitchen. She followed me in. I tortured her with questions. Why was she here? “I used to be a wet nurse at Major Hidayet’s,” she said. In