''A few hours after the incident, Aziz Bey went home. He sat for a while in the light of a blinking bulb that settled over the room like a grave illness, and with eyes brimming with tears that just could not fall, he looked at a shattered moonlight that was reflected in the dirty waters of the Golden Horn..''
The writing of Ayfer Tunç is in essence urban, and yet she manages to imbue her characters with a fragile humanity and an old-fashioned sense of the melancholy of modern life. Aziz Bey is at once the most genuine and the saddest of all her heroes. Here we see the life of an ordinary Turkish man, a master tambour player of local fame, whose life stretches from Istanbul to Beirut because of his obsessive love for Maryam. We witness the fading of this love with the passage of time and changing of circumstances, bringing us closer to this man than to many other modern protagonists. With the soft touch of an accomplished writer, the life of this singular musician is laid bare in all its sweetness and mediocrity, until we are almost sure that we might catch a glimpse of him next time we visit the vibrant, all-night bars of Istanbul.
''A few hours after the incident, Aziz Bey went home. He sat for a while in the light of a blinking bulb that settled over the room like a grave illness, and with eyes brimming with tears that just could not fall, he looked at a shattered moonlight that was reflected in the dirty waters of the Golden Horn..''
The writing of Ayfer Tunç is in essence urban, and yet she manages to imbue her characters with a fragile humanity and an old-fashioned sense of the melancholy of modern life. Aziz Bey is at once the most genuine and the saddest of all her heroes. Here we see the life of an ordinary Turkish man, a master tambour player of local fame, whose life stretches from Istanbul to Beirut because of his obsessive love for Maryam. We witness the fading of this love with the passage of time and changing of circumstances, bringing us closer to this man than to many other modern protagonists. With the soft touch of an accomplished writer, the life of this singular musician is laid bare in all its sweetness and mediocrity, until we are almost sure that we might catch a glimpse of him next time we visit the vibrant, all-night bars of Istanbul.
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Overview
''A few hours after the incident, Aziz Bey went home. He sat for a while in the light of a blinking bulb that settled over the room like a grave illness, and with eyes brimming with tears that just could not fall, he looked at a shattered moonlight that was reflected in the dirty waters of the Golden Horn..''
The writing of Ayfer Tunç is in essence urban, and yet she manages to imbue her characters with a fragile humanity and an old-fashioned sense of the melancholy of modern life. Aziz Bey is at once the most genuine and the saddest of all her heroes. Here we see the life of an ordinary Turkish man, a master tambour player of local fame, whose life stretches from Istanbul to Beirut because of his obsessive love for Maryam. We witness the fading of this love with the passage of time and changing of circumstances, bringing us closer to this man than to many other modern protagonists. With the soft touch of an accomplished writer, the life of this singular musician is laid bare in all its sweetness and mediocrity, until we are almost sure that we might catch a glimpse of him next time we visit the vibrant, all-night bars of Istanbul.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781908236111 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Istros Books |
| Publication date: | 03/25/2013 |
| Series: | Books from the Edge |
| Pages: | 154 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.06(w) x 7.81(h) x 0.36(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Aziz Bey Incident And Other Stories
By Ayfer Tunc, Stephanie Ates
Peter Owen Publishers
Copyright © 2013 Ayfer TuncAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-908236-11-1
CHAPTER 1
THE AZIZ BEY INCIDENT
A tragic event occurred at Zeki's tavern one night. Zeki roughed up Aziz Bey and threw him out. No one could quite remember how it began and what happened, but everyone went around making far-fetched claims. Some said, 'Zeki started it'; others objected, 'No, Aziz Bey was as drunk as a skunk.' Some found fault with the patrons, and others said, 'It wasn't worth blowing out of all proportion.'
A few hours after the incident, Aziz Bey went home. He sat for a while in the light of a blinking bulb that settled over the room like a grave illness, and with eyes brimming with tears that just could not fall, he looked at a shattered moonlight reflected in the dirty waters of the Golden Horn and frequently obscured by clouds. The last thing to pass through his mind was the memory of a very short, but very happy time: three days spent in a hot city, blue as far as the eye could see, shaded by palm trees, dates, and other, taller palms. That happiness suddenly changed to sorrow and this was reflected in his face. The sunken old face that had given up hiding the entire suffering of a lifetime full of mistakes seemed for a moment as if about to cry, and stayed that way.
There was no one to softly close his lustreless eyes in the hours that stretched towards the morning of that cold and rainy night. No one to open the fingers crossed over each other like a childishly peevish sign, no one to place his arms as light as a bird on either side. He had slumped into his armchair. The spirit suffering inside him drifted out. He had come to the end of a ruffled life that left a fond memory in very few hearts, and found peace.
It's all over now. The streets stretch out like a giant awakening, and as night falls on the city the locals of those streets still miss him. Gafur the mussel seller asks Bogos the Agos-seller about him, Bogos asks Tayfur the lottery agent, and Tayfur asks the hip amputee Ibo, who sells single cigarettes out of the pack. Even Dark Haci, who sells prayer beads and fragrances on Aga Mosque Street, looks for him with eyes whose whites are too bright. The locals of those streets miss Aziz Bey – whose secret sorrow they did not sense for years – swaggering down the street in his thread -bare stage costume with purple satin collar and cuffs, carrying his tambur in its faded black case.
The street was orphaned.
Bahri the clarinettist contends what took place that night in Zeki's tavern was a tragic incident. Far better for it not to have happened. Zeki went too far. Of course he was right, but he should not have manhandled Aziz Bey. On the night of the incident, Bahri returned home, lay on his bed and pondered. He didn't know what he thought and why, but he sensed Aziz Bey was different, and that 'such a man never deserved such treatment.' That night sleep escaped him; just as he was about to get up he found what he was looking for: it occurred to him that Aziz Bey was a dusty souvenir of the days when his musician companions counted among respected folk. That's when he ached inside intensely. Bahri is someone who had seen those good old days; he knows the proper way to behave with good manners. He knows very well what loyalty means. If it were not for the memory of those days, he would lose the meaning of life completely.
Mercan the darbuka player, when asked what happened said, 'I didn't see, I don't know, I was in the bog, whatever happened, happened then.' He wasn't in the bog or anything in actual fact, he simply didn't care one way or the other. In fact, he had sort of seen what had happened, but said to himself, 'Who cares?' Mercan doesn't have the soul of a fellow musician. As if the skilful hands that beat the darbuka were not his. His mouth may sing, If the end of this love affair is going to be painful, but his mind is elsewhere. The day he parks his minibus in front of his door he'll bid farewell to his night-time partners. All he can think of is a blue minibus.
As for Davut the waiter: he saw everything, he knows it all. He'd been secretly anticipating this for days, after all. A nasty piece of work by nature, he's treacherous, venomous, and loves trouble. Even with nothing untoward he says, 'I can feel something bad is going to happen one of these days.' He is innately evil. The one who speaks out of turn most and makes mountains out of molehills all over the place. He laughs with Zeki to his face, and dances attendance on him because he's the boss; but when he feels that Zeki has passed from merrily tipsy to drunk, he fills a bag with bunches of bananas, blocks of cheese, lamb chops by the rack, and takes them straight home.
However much Zeki says about Aziz Bey, 'I was right, I'd had it up to here, that pillock had buggered up the business!' he has grown listless since that night; he looks on the verge of tears. Something inside he can't pin down aches intensely. Some days he thinks it is his stomach that is aching, on others, his heart. He closes the tavern, goes home and sits in front of the window. He looks at the lights sliding like fireflies into the city's night, trying to discern where Aziz Bey's now extinguished light might once have burned, and asks his wife, 'But was I wrong Mukadder?' his eyes brimming, 'Who'd do a thing like that?' And all his wife replies, unthinkingly, is, 'Oh, for God's sake, Zeki, if I've told you once, I've told you a million times, of course you wuz right,' stretched on the bed, her hair spread out on the pillow, lost in contemplation of the clinking of the gold bangles that cover her right wrist. But no amount of vindication can mollify him; the ache inside does not go away.
As if passing slowly into the sun's shadow, like evening falling unnoticed, Aziz Bey passed from a bright, happy face to a sorrowful one. He acquired a sorrowful past. His nose was always in the air, his head held high. Even if he had not managed to live any other way, he realised that evening, while staring at the dirty waters of the Golden Horn, that in fact he had always made this assumption. Yet he had been gravely mistaken. And again, he realised his life had been nothing but one big misconception.
He went through the streets that resemble no others, where blood-shedding rage and maddening indifference, stone-hard pain and hysterical joy, tragic births and ridiculous deaths, venomous hatred and feeble love, cats and dogs, the crooked and the straight, white and black live together as brothers and sisters of the same parents but tear each other to pieces nevertheless; streets that are too complicated to be understood by those of the respectable life façade, and that resemble a brief summary of the enigma called life. He went, he turned round and came back. His relatively short life was quickly spent on a speck of earth populated by those who fed on one another.
Without knowing all this who could know who was right, and who was wrong?
In actual fact, Aziz Bey should have been seen doing his tambur taqsim at the Palace Night Club in his black costume with purple satin collar and cuffs begun by a lachrymose tailor years earlier for a famous stage artist, but left unfinished when he went blind. Aziz Bey used to run from one nightclub to the other; running being a figure of speech. He never ran; more like he could barely keep up with the offers. He swaggered, his nose always in the air, his glance always on the horizon at a lofty point that no one could see. After a great deal of reluctance, he was good enough to oblige with his tambur those waiting patiently to hear his art. Producers would queue at his door during the Izmir Fair. Even if not the most important singers, the next most important ones used to phone Aziz Bey to ask him to back them, and if that didn't work, they would ask through a mediator. He would leave them all waiting at his door. There was a spirit in his playing; his plucking of the tambur was extraordinary. It was like nectar to those who listened. And he'd always been grumpy, too. But he had such a compelling attitude and manner, and a look that said 'I know what I'm doing' that those very capricious singers with painted blue eyelids, teased blonde hair, flirting in sequins, tulle and feathers, swallowed their tongues in his presence.
The truth of the matter is that he never harboured a youthful passion to become a tambur player or anything like that. It was fate that pushed him down this path. At some point in his long and blurred story the tambur stuck to his hand. He was a little flighty, resembling a bird in spirit. He was a dapper lad too and quite handsome. He was constantly falling in love with married women nearing middle age with a penchant for escapades, with broad bosoms and wavy hair. His passion would quickly pass like a soft breeze springing up on summer evenings. Women would send him ridiculous letters wet with tears, written in an uneven scrawl full of clichéd sentences of passion. He would read and then discard them all, laughing as he read them.
He would meet and part from women over and over again under the acacia trees in country tea gardens with wooden chairs. Then? Then nothing ... A pack of ladies' cigarettes forgotten on the table was all that remained of almost every woman. After smoking the last cigarette in the forgotten pack, the woman would slip from his mind and disappear. He would not even remember the women he had left without even a backward glance. Those women would look out for his coming, go to the places where they had met and wait for him; they would keep thinking about him and shed tears at night in their beds: did he care? He expected such a passion from life, one that would suddenly hit him like a slap, stupefy him, paralyse him. A love that hit one like that was what Aziz Bey called 'passion'. Becoming a tambur player was the last thing on his mind in those days ...
His grandfather used to play a little, in actual fact. Not just a little, he played pretty well. He died before his time, and the tambur became a family keepsake. Aziz Bey's father did not appreciate its value. Not that he'd ever cared to know what it was that permeated its strings. But even so, he didn't have the heart to break and throw away this sole memento of his father; a man who spent his life not being able to say no to anyone, being pushed around, and taking refuge only in the tambur. He put this poor dejected musical instrument away on top of the cupboard.
When he was still just a bleary-eyed child with a runny nose who turned the house upside down, Aziz Bey found the dusty, forgotten tambur where it had been left, on top of the cupboard. After that he never put down this strange toy that was several times taller than himself.
Just for fun, he would keep scraping the bow across the strings. When she heard the tambur's sad tone, his sorrowful mother, usually up to her elbows in water with washing soda, would call to her son in pathetic agitation. 'For goodness sake son, put it back, don't let your father see ...' Even though she couldn't cope with a son who wanted to play with the noisy toy all day, the poor woman managed each time to take the tambur away from him and hide it just before his father was due home. When Aziz Bey had grown a little older the tambur quietly passed from his mother and father's room to his own.
Aziz Bey's father was ill tempered; even if there were any delicate feelings chiselled deeply into his soul, he would not let anyone see them. His wife put up with a lot from him. The permanent frown, a fist continually brought down on the table because the food was salty, the shirt not ironed, the bread was stale; the bass voice reproving at every opportunity ... But still, at night when all was quiet, when he was boozing on his balcony that almost glimpsed the sea from the slopes of Samatya, his face revealed an unexplained sadness, and he would hum those old, delicate songs that were in his head,
Who graces your beautiful rose garden Who pleads kissing your feet ...
Aziz Bey would contend his father hadn't been able marry his true love. Not true. As Aziz Bey had written himself, he had also rewritten his father and his grandfather. There were times when he rewrote a whole lifetime. And he ended up believing it all. After his father was dead and gone, when total loneliness had finally replaced the resentment he felt, he gave his father the benefit of having finer feelings imprisoned in a corner of his heart. In actual fact, his father had married his mother out of love, but was always burdened by life, always struggling to stand upright. Instead of being a downtrodden, submissive child like his extremely sensitive and continually oppressed father, he wanted to be as hard as stone and aloof. That's all there was to it.
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 Bakirköy-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 raki and meze and would sing, accompanying his older musician friends, Even if you pale and fade you are still a rose-pink mouth If 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 understood 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.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Aziz Bey Incident And Other Stories by Ayfer Tunc, Stephanie Ates. Copyright © 2013 Ayfer Tunc. Excerpted by permission of Peter Owen Publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
The Aziz Bey Incident,Tales of Womanising,
A Cold Winter,
The Snow Traveller,
Mikail's Heart Stopped,
Red Torment,