The Sick Man
He pointed at the foot of the bed. "Come on, sit down over there."
I perched on the edge. On his back was a woman's knitted cardigan, mottled and worn at the elbows. His head rested against the white iron bars of the bedstead. His clothes hung in a pile at the foot of the bed, on my side.
The host sensed me looking around. "I sleep in here with the kids," he said. "They make the room a mess. Anyway, the house is small — we barely fit."
"Are you a large family?"
"More or less. I have a grown daughter, she's in high school. And the one you see. Then my wife's sister and her husband, two brothers-in-law... We all live together. My sister-in-law has kids too — two of them. You know how it is with housing in Ankara. No way to live separately."
Outside, the doorbell kept ringing. From the noise and loud voices, I could tell someone from the family had come home. At one point the bedroom door opened. A plump woman of about forty entered, her short hair spilling over her ears and face. She leaned over and whispered something to Raif Efendi. Without answering her, he pointed to me and introduced us: "A colleague from the office... My wife."
Then he turned to her. "Take it from my jacket pocket."
This time she spoke without whispering in his ear. "I didn't come for money — who's going to go get it? And you still haven't gotten up!"
"Send Nurten. It's three steps away."
"How can I send a kid that small to the store at night? In this cold? Besides, she's a girl. And even if I told her, would she listen?"
Raif Efendi thought it over. Then, as if he'd finally found a solution, he shook his head. "She'll go, she'll go," he said, and looked down at his lap.
After his wife left, he turned to me. "Even buying bread is an ordeal in this house. Once I get sick, they can't find anyone to send."
As if it were my business, I asked, "Are your brothers-in-law young?"
He looked at my face but didn't answer. The expression on his face gave me the impression he hadn't heard my question at all. But a few minutes later he said, "No, they're not young. Both of them work. They're civil servants like us. My brother-in-law's at the Ministry of Economy — he got them jobs. They didn't go to school; they don't even have a middle-school diploma." He broke off abruptly and asked, "Did you bring something for translation?"
"Yes. It's needed by tomorrow. They're sending the office boy in the morning."
He took the papers and set them beside him.
"I also wondered about your illness."
"Thank you. It's been dragging on. I don't have the courage to get up."
There was a strange curiosity in his eyes, as if he was checking whether my concern was genuine. I was ready to do anything to convince him. But those eyes, which for the first time had shown some kind of emotion, quickly returned to their usual expressionlessness and that empty smile of his.
I sighed and stood up. He suddenly sat up and took my hand. "Thank you for visiting, my boy," he said. There was warmth in his voice. He seemed to sense what I was feeling.
After that day, a closeness really did grow between me and Raif Efendi. I can't quite say his attitude toward me changed. I wouldn't even dream of claiming he became intimate with me or opened his heart. He remained the same closed, silent man. Some evenings we did walk out of the office together all the way to his house, and sometimes we'd even go in and have coffee in the guest room with its red furniture. But during those times we either said nothing, or talked about trivial things — the high cost of living in Ankara, the broken sidewalks in Ismetpasa Neighborhood. He rarely said anything about his house or his family. Every once in a while he'd say, "Our daughter got another low grade in math," and then immediately change the subject. I hesitated to ask about any of it myself. The family members I'd met on my first visit hadn't made a good impression on me.
When I came out of the sick man's room and passed through the hall, the two young men and a girl of fifteen or sixteen I'd seen sitting around the big table started whispering and giggling, huddling together before I'd even turned my back. I knew there was nothing funny about me. But like all empty-headed people that age, they considered laughing at the first person they saw a sign of superiority. Little Nurten was even struggling to imitate her sister and uncles. Every time I went to that house afterward, I saw the same thing. I was still young myself — not yet twenty-five — but this strange habit I observed in some young people amazed me: this peculiar tendency to regard a stranger they'd met for the first time as something very odd. I noticed that Raif Efendi's position wasn't pleasant either, that among that crowd he seemed like an extra, unnecessary thing.
Later, as I kept visiting, I got to know all those young people. They weren't bad people. They were just empty, completely empty. All their rudeness came from that. Facing the yawning emptiness inside themselves, they could only satisfy themselves and feel their own existence by belittling and mocking others, by laughing at them. I used to pay attention to their conversations. Vedat and Cihad, the two lowest-ranking clerks at the Ministry of Economy, had nothing better to do than gossip about their colleagues. Necla, Raif Efendi's older daughter, did the same with her schoolmates — ridiculing in others the same oddities of dress and behavior that they themselves possessed, bubbling with laughter.
"Did you see that outfit Mualla wore to the wedding? Hee-hee-hee!"
"If you'd seen how she brushed off our Orhan! Ha-ha-ha!"
Ferhunde Hanim, Raif Efendi's sister-in-law, was so busy dealing with her two children, aged three and four, that as soon as she found the chance to leave them with her sister, she'd throw on a silk dress, hastily put on makeup, and go out. I only saw her a few times, fussing in front of the buffet mirror tucking her dyed, waved hair under a tulle hat. She was still fairly young, around thirty, but countless wrinkles covered the corners of her eyes and mouth. Her bead-blue eyes never rested on anything for more than a second, reflecting the constant, causeless boredom she'd been condemned to since birth. She got angry at her children — always neglected, their faces and hands perpetually dirty, their complexions pale — as if they were two punishments inflicted on her by some cursed enemy. When she was all dressed up to go out, she didn't know how to keep them away from her so their dirty hands wouldn't ruin her clothes.
Ferhunde Hanim's husband, Nurettin Bey, one of the section chiefs at the Ministry of Economy, was a different version of our friend Hamdi. A man of thirty or thirty-two, with wavy brown hair that he carefully combed back and puffed up like a barber's apprentice. After saying "How are you?" he'd press his lips together and give a slight nod, as if he'd just uttered some great wisdom. While speaking, he'd fix his eyes on your face, and a smile would wander in his eyes, saying, "Come on, is that really what you call talking? What do you know, anyway?"
After finishing a technical school, he'd been sent to Italy for some reason to study leatherworking, but all he'd learned there was a little Italian and how to put on the airs of an important man. Still, he had great qualities for succeeding in life: first, he confidently considered himself worthy of very high positions; and second, by pronouncing half-baked ideas on every subject he knew and didn't know, and by despising everyone without exception, he convinced everyone around him of his value. (I think the family caught this disease of contempt from this brother-in-law, whom they admired so much.) Then he took great care of his appearance — shaved every day, had his worn trousers ironed strictly under his supervision, and would devote an entire Saturday to going from store to store to find the most stylish shoes and the most fashionable socks. Later I learned that his salary only covered his and his wife's clothing; the thirty-five lira each his two brothers-in-law earned amounted to nothing, so all the household expenses fell on poor Raif Efendi's meager salary. Despite that, everyone in the house except the poor old man called the shots. Raif Efendi's wife, Mihriye Hanim — who had aged before forty and combined a strange fatness with flaccid flesh and breasts that hung to her belly — spent all day cooking in the kitchen, darning piles of children's socks in her spare time, and looking after her sister's unruly brats, yet she could never please the household. No one asked how the house ran; instead, because she considered herself worthy of a much higher life, she'd start new unpleasantness by criticizing the food and turning up her nose at everything. When Nurettin Bey said, "What kind of thing is this, really?" he seemed to mean, "Where are the hundreds of lira I'm giving going, for God's sake?" And the brothers-in-law, wearing seven-lira scarves around their necks, didn't hesitate to say, "I don't like this food, fry me an egg," or "I'm not full, fry me some sausage," sending their sister Mihriye from the table to the kitchen. Then, when eleven kuruş were needed some evening to buy bread, they couldn't bear to take it from their own pockets, so they'd wake Raif Efendi from his sleep in his sickroom, and as if that weren't enough, they'd get angry that he still wasn't well and hadn't gone to the store himself.
The disorder in the hidden parts of the house contrasted sharply with the order in the hall and guest room, which was to some extent Necla's doing. But the others also found it convenient to put a mask on the face of their house when dealing with acquaintances.
They'd even contributed themselves to paying installments to furniture stores for years, putting up with a lot of hardship. But now the red velvet set made the guests nod in appreciation, and the twelve-bulb radio could drown the whole neighborhood in noise. And the gold-rimmed crystal liquor set displayed in the glass-fronted cabinet never let Nurettin Bey lose face with the friends he frequently brought home to drink rakı.
Even though Raif Efendi bore all these burdens, in that house his presence and absence seemed to amount to the same thing. Everyone from youngest to oldest seemed not to notice him. They never spoke to him about anything but daily needs and money matters; often they preferred to handle even those through Mihriye Hanim. It was as if a soulless machine was sent out in the morning with a list of orders and came back in the evening with its arms full. Nurettin Bey, who five years earlier, when he wanted to marry Ferhunde Hanim, had clung to Raif Efendi, played all sorts of roles to please him, and never forgot to bring his future brother-in-law something to curry favor every time he visited after the engagement — even he now seemed tired of living in the same house with such a meaningless person. They got angry at him for not earning more money, for not providing a more luxurious life, but at the same time they were sure he was a zero, insignificant and worthless. Even Necla, who seemed fairly levelheaded, and little Nurten, still in elementary school, had probably been influenced by their uncle, aunt, and older uncles, and had joined in the general attitude toward their father. The love they showed him was hurried, as if fulfilling a chore; their concern for his illness was affected, like the false pity one shows a beggar. Only his wife, Mihriye Hanim — who seemed to have grown dull over the years from never- easing work and financial worries — looked after him as best she could, trying to make sure he wasn't looked down on or humiliated by his own children.
When there was a guest at supper, to prevent her brothers or Nurettin Bey from giving loud orders like "Let brother-in-law go get it," she'd pull her husband into the bedroom and say in a coaxing voice, "Go on, get eight eggs and a bottle of rakı from the store. Let's not get them up from the table." But she no longer thought about why she and her husband didn't sit at those tables, or why, if they did happen to once in a blue moon, they were met with uneasy looks, as if they'd committed a disrespect. Maybe she didn't even notice anymore.
Raif Efendi had a strange tenderness toward his wife too. He truly seemed to pity this woman who for months had never had time to wear anything other than her house dress. Sometimes he'd ask, "How are you, Hanim? Very tired today?" Sometimes he'd sit her down and talk about the children's promotions in school or the upcoming holiday expenses.
But there was no sign that he was connected to the other family members by even the slightest emotional bond. Sometimes he'd fix his eyes on his older daughter, as if waiting for something from her — something warm, something sweet. But those moments passed quickly. Her daughter's meaningless coquetry or a misplaced laugh would suddenly reveal the gap between them.
I thought a lot about Raif Efendi's situation. There was no way a man like this — what kind of man, I didn't know myself, but I was sure he wasn't what he appeared — no, there was no way such a man would deliberately run away from the people closest to him. The whole problem was that those around him didn't know him, and he wasn't the type to try to make himself known. After a certain point, there was no way to break the ice, no way to remove the terrible estrangement these people felt from one another. Knowing how difficult it is to know another person, people prefer to wander around blindly, at random, and only become aware of each other's existence when they collide, rather than attempting that arduous task.
Only, as I said, Raif Efendi seemed to expect something from his older daughter, Necla. This girl, who imitated her heavily made-up aunt in her facial expressions, in the way she moved her mouth and hands, and drew all her spiritual strength from her brother-in-law's pompousness — there were still signs, despite those thick outer shells, that something of the real human being remained inside her. Sometimes when she scolded her sister Nurten, who tried to carry her rudeness to her father to the point of insult, a genuine indignation could be sensed. Occasionally, when Raif Efendi was spoken of with contempt at the table or in the room, she'd slam the door and leave. But these were only occasional bursts from the humanity trapped inside her, a gasping for breath, and the false personality that her environment had built with years of patient labor was strong enough to prevent her true identity from rising up.
But perhaps with the impatience of my youth, I was angry at Raif Efendi's almost frightening silence. Whether at the company or at home, he not only tolerated being disrespected by people completely alien to his soul, but almost seemed to find it fitting. I knew that people who aren't understood by those around them, who are always misjudged, eventually begin to feel a kind of pride and bitter pleasure from this loneliness. But I could never imagine they would actually consider their surroundings right in mistreating them.
On many occasions I'd noticed he wasn't a person whose feelings had grown dull. On the contrary, he was very touchy, extremely perceptive and attentive. Nothing escaped his eyes, even when they seemed to look at the floor. One day he heard his daughters arguing softly outside about who would make the coffee they were supposed to bring me, and he didn't say a word. But ten days later, when I visited for the second time, he immediately called out: