A Useless Man Read Online Free Page B

room as, saying nothing, he pressed his thick, wet lips against her neck.
    The sun rose, flickering in the mirror and their eyes. They opened the curtains.

The Barges

    The crowds had gone. They were the last two men on the bridge. One was dressed like a laborer, and the other – who looked to be about the same age – like a sailor. They were sitting side by side, smoking in silence as they looked across the water in the direction of Üsküdar.
    Üsküdar is best seen from a distance, and now, as it slept, its dark shores lit here and there by red lights, it looked so distant, and beautiful, as to be forever out of reach.
    The sailor turned to his companion. “I have an aunt in Üsküdar,” he said. “We could go over and visit her one day.”
    “Maybe. We’ll see.”
    Sinking back into silence, they watched a motor launch pass beneath the bridge. The barges trailing behind it were carrying full loads, tied down with tarpaulin. They must have been carrying some sort of grain – wheat, or barley, or corn. They had that softness.
    As the laborer watched the last barge slip under the bridge, he looked at the load that he had decided must be wheat, and for a moment was tempted to jump into that softness. He tried to hold the words back. But couldn’t.
    “I wish I’d jumped right in,” he said.
    “Just like in the movies, eh?”
    The laborer didn’t answer. He didn’t answer, but he smiled.
    It was a winter night in the middle of Ramadan. Turning together to look at the old city, they looked at the lights strung up between the minarets.
    “I love those lights,” the sailor said.
    And the laborer said, “So do I.”
    On weekends one of these men would take himself off to Galata. The other to Şehzedebaşı … On very rare occasions, they would come together to the bridge to watch the night. They whiled away the night watching the lights of Üsküdar and the great ships of Galata, the smaller vessels tied to the piers, and the motor launches pulling barges that were sometimes empty, sometimes full. They knew from these evenings that they could count on one another; just by exchanging four or five sentences, they knew they were good friends.
    Each time the laborer came here and saw a barge loaded down with wheat, he had to fight the urge to climb over the railings and drop himself into it. Sometimes he would say this to his friend, and his friend would say:
    “Just like in the movies, eh?”
    Then they would go home, or, if they had this conversation early enough, they would suddenly remember a movie house in Yüksekkaldırım, and so they’d go there and sit together in the front row.
    No matter what film was showing, it left them happy and smiling. They didn’t say a word on the way home. And that night one of them would dream of kissing his Galata friend like the tough guy in the film. Meanwhile, the other dreamed of taking his friend to the darkest street of Şehzedebaşı and burying his nose in the palms of his hands and kissing them. These dreams would rob them both of sleep and make wrecks of them.
    “Did you sleep well?” one would ask.
    And the other would say, “I sure did.”
    If one of them smiled, the other would fall asleep right away. If he didn’t, he was already asleep.
    It was a white, moonlit night. Light puffs of smoke were rising from the ferries docked along the pier. They made a man yearn to set out on a long journey. Now and then a ferry would approach the pier and behind it a second ferry, lit by a second light, to send a flurry of passengers up and down the gangplank.
    Suddenly, the laborer said:
    “Why don’t we go with them?”
    The other said:
    “Let’s go, then.”
    They slept in the same room. One was from Sivas. The other from Izmir. One worked at the pier, tying up the ferries as they docked. The other worked in a mill. The room they shared cost them four lira a month but they never once spent an evening in. They hardly ever saw each other. One finished work at nine.