The Aziz Bey Incident. Ayfer Tunc

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       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 Boğos the Agos-seller* about him, Boğos asks Tayfur the lottery agent, and Tayfur asks the hip amputee Ibo, who sells single cigarettes out of the pack. Even Dark Hacı, who sells prayer beads and fragrances on Ağa 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 СКАЧАТЬ