TALES OF WOMANISING
I was either going to die or be reborn from my old wounds. Women were my old wounds. Non-existent women. My decay, my life withering unbidden like a sheaf of grass; they were like rocks worn away by my worthlessness, flowing like running water.
My cowardice, my cringing, my introversion.
And then my beardlessness, the reason my wife cut my hair when it grew.
My old wounds were the layers of cardboard I lined my shoes with, and the ones I replaced as they were wore out... Sundays at home… in secret.
They were my wife’s large, but scary, black eyes that made one want to cry, and her bones bulging under her knuckles.
They were the prints of red lips marking the coffee cups I carried in hands trembling with fear in my early youth when I was a merchant tailor’s apprentice.
And they were my weird and wretched wedding photograph shot by the drunkard who ran the photographer’s shop in the neighbourhood. We both looked as though we were crying.
But despite all this, I wouldn’t have wanted my end to be like this. I had no idea. A little before the tale that I am about to relate took place I was: between the ages of thirty and forty, between being married and being single, between being alive and being dead. My life resembled a straight, long, thin line. Some -thing like a sick person’s endless moment of death. As if I’d been condemned to walk this long, thin line till eternity.
Sometimes, seemingly always in winter in the late afternoon, I’d sit at the window end of my shop counter, stare out and ask myself,Am I a happy man?I had a passable shop, a passable wife, a roof over my head, a meal on the hob and two children.So I should be happy, I’d murmur to myself.
And so I really thought, but I’d then catch a glimpse of the mirror opposite. I’d see a literally blue man, a face creased and shrunk like a cheap blue skirt lining. It was as though blue ink filled the lines of my face. My posture resembled an abandoned pet dog. For no reason I’d take down bunches of zips from the shelf, and swap the button boxes quite pointlessly. I’d attempt to sweep up the shop, and try to forget the abandoned, blue pet dog I saw in the mirror.
And that’s why I abandoned myself to this strange game, like rolling very gently down a mound of sand lapped at the bottom by the waves of a warm sea.
The game started after I met Turcan. Before him, a quiet old Jew sold stockings for varicose veins in the shop next door. If we met in the mornings he’d say,Hello neighbour, enter his shop and leave quietly in the evenings. One day he quietly died. Turcan bought the Jew’s shop. So quietness died too. If it had been up to me, when I met this man who covered his bald pate with a small chestnut wig and who, with every step he took, left an acrid, tobacco-like smell in the street, I’d wish him a dry good luck and defer introductions.
But that’s not what happened. One day a small lorry drew up to the door, and as mirrors of different sizes were being unloaded an altercation began between Turcan and the porters. He dismissed the porters who’d already unloaded half of the mirrors, and sticking his head into my shop – without a by-your-leave, as if we’d been friends for forty years, and with a funny expression in his large grey-blue eyes, astounding and even frightening me, he cheerfully asked me,Gi’s a hand, neighbour? I couldn’t say a thing; there was the sourness of a lemon in my mouth: as if the words would come out shrivelled were I to speak. I came out of my shop, humped the mirrors on my back and carried them into his.
That day he took me to lunch, which led on to his tales of womanising. We drank rakı, and ate bean salad and pickled bonito. Turcan invariably talked about women. And I noticed that it was as though all the women he described were virtually boneless. I thought about those women’s hands, and my eyes were dazzled by the whiteness of their skin. And then how talkative and warm the women he talked about were. They knew how to laugh.
And that’s the least of it. Women kept calling Turcan on his mobile. He exchanged smutty banter, roared with laughter and belched every now and then. His forehead sweated as he laughed, and when he wiped it away his wig moved. While he was speaking to women, to the women I imagined to be virtually boneless and so very pale, I thought how very many and beautiful women there were in the world. My wife never once came to my mind while thinking about the beautiful women in the world. My old wounds hurt. My rib cage felt as though it had collapsed after a huge punch, too tight for the trouble within me; all those tales of womanising infested my insides like a deep and fatal affliction.
A few days later, Turcan introduced me to two of his friends and took me out to dinner. Tales of womanising multiplied and became more varied. They three tall men received calls from women non-stop, as sat with their coats over their shoulders and spoke of cheques, maturity dates, and of course, women. I listened to them and laughed too late, struggled to understand. Late in the evening, they got up to meet go and meet the women they’d been talking about; I assumed a knowing smile and nodded meaningfully. They wouldn’t let me pay the bill. With avuncular smiles, they patted me on the shoulder.
A coy snow fell as we left the restaurant. I said goodbye to them with a cordiality I’d never before shown, and as the three men raffishly got into t
