A Useless Man Read Online Free

gate, ran down to the shore and stayed in the warm water till evening. Later I was back in the garden with the boysfrom the neighborhood. But this time, I had nothing to be excited about. Pretending to listen, I kept glancing over at the garden gate. But she never came out for me. Eventually the boys left. I walked back into the house. I went to look for her in the kitchen, but she wasn’t there.
    Everyone knew that she kept her
bocha
in a corner of the storage room. When something in the house was missing, it was the first place we would look. Without saying a word, we’d go through her
bocha
with its patchwork of red, white, yellow and navy blue squares.
    I went into the storage room, heavy with the scent of oil. I looked for the
bocha
, but it was gone.

Wedding Night

    Ahmet was sixteen, but his birth had yet to be registered. He had the flattest of noses and the narrowest of foreheads and jet black hair that shone with glints of midnight blue. He already had whiskers. Inside his navy serge suit, his body looked slender, athletic, and perfectly formed. When his father presented him to the registrar, the man did not hide his displeasure.
    “Shame on you!” he said. “And why was it, I wonder, that you’ve taken so long to register this young man’s birth? What sort of tricks did you pull during the census?”
    During the census they’d hidden him in the hayloft. There had been rumors of another war. Ahmet was just twelve years old at the time, and their only son, but the army could still have taken him. That’s what they’d reckoned. It had turned out differently, but what did it matter? Ahmet wasn’t like Turkey’s other children. Ahmet’s father was Rüstem Ağa and even after the threat of war had passed, there had still been a need for precautions.
    The registrar asked, “Is this boy twenty yet?”
    It had been decided that sixteen-year-old Ahmet had been born in 1909. And that he was to marry a twenty-six-year-old woman born in 1911.
    It was a dark autumn night, and the rain was pelting down. The sky was wandering the streets. A band of men holding lanterns was hurrying Ahmet across the village square, which was littered with the crushed husks of chestnuts. Pulling Ahmet to the back of the group, Black Abdi said his piece once again:
    “Ahmet,” he said, “I’m your best man. So now listen to me carefully.” (Here he paused.) “When we’ve pushed you in there and closed the door on you, what you do next is kneel down on the rug and pray twice for God’s blessing. Do you understand?”
    The rain was really coming down now. The gutters were gushing, and the lanterns were far ahead of them. They had forgotten to look out for puddles. Their trousers were sopping wet.
    The young men in the coffeehouse wiped the mist off the windows; seeing Ahmet pass by with his best man, they smiled. The old men, whose minds were on their taxes, rose to stand at the door, sending him on his way with strange jokes.
    Ahmet was so startled that he fell into a pile of chestnuts and hurt himself. As Abdi lifted him up, he called out to the men who were racing away with their lanterns.
    “Wait for us, will you?” Then, turning back to Ahmet, he said, “The rest you know. You’re old enough, and big enough. Don’t make me spell it out for you.”
    Ahmet said nothing. The chestnut thorns still stung. He was chewing on something, but were they questions, or were they chestnuts? It was hard to tell. His mind was fogged by the
rakı
they’d given him, and then they’d pulled him into this procession, and now their will was his command.
    As they led him along, they showered this lean, solidly built and bright-eyed boy with taunts that seemed somehow serious.
    Gülsüm’s house was so very far away tonight. The rain was coming downeven harder now. They were almost running. When at last they reached the house, the women inside threw open the door. The groom was covered head-to-toe in mud. The women brushed him off. His navy