At the intermission Zeberjet retracted his leg. The lights went out again as Ekrem was telling about the film he’d seen a month before. Zeberjet pressed against his arm. Images of actors, horses and wagons came through confusedly; his leg and the boy’s rested adjacent. A slight shift and he would feel that warmth again. It was the saloon, with a four-on-one fight. The young man’s fist connected with a face, whose owner collapsed sideways across a table that fell apart under him. “Wow,” went the boy. Their legs touched. Zeberjet was getting a hard-on. He put his left hand in his pocket to arrange it, trying not to move his right side. With a glance in either direction he removed his hand from the pocket. He imagined himself being circumcised, mentally applied the pincers squeeze. The erection subsided. He had used this trick at night in the barracks too, when Sergeant Refik and Fatihli would come around for after-dark hazing. “Hand me that slipper,” Fatihli had said. He tugged at the collar of his sweater with his left hand. The male couples—older man, young man—who often checked in…. He relaxed his arm and leg and stood up.
“I’m leaving,” he said.
The boy did a double take and grabbed his hand.
“Not yet, abi, please. Let’s stay till the end.”
Zeberjet sat down again, his hand still in Ekrem’s. The boy’s palm was hard, his leg warm. In the town, they were laying an ambush for the young hero. The judge’s daughter told the blacksmith. Time was running out. Already three gunmen had come in and taken up positions, two by the window, the third upstairs. When the young hero appeared at the head of Main Street the blacksmith ran out waving his arms. A few shots cracked out and he fell while the hero came by at a gallop, lying over his horse to shoot one rifleman in an attic window and a second in the church belfry. There was gunfire everywhere but horse and rider seemed untouchable. “What bull,” muttered Zeberjet. He turned to the boy, who was gazing at the screen with neck outstretched and lips parted. Zeberjet closed his eyes. The warmth there, the hand, felt natural now. He pressed with his leg and gave the hand a squeeze. No response came from the boy, who went on watching the film undisturbed, unaware. Zeberjet’s palm was sweaty and he let go, pulling his leg away at the same time. He waited for Ekrem to move toward him, but no. Opening his eyes he saw a broad, deserted street where two men slowly approached one another. Suddenly they drew. But the hero fired first, and down went the banker, writhing. In agony, he managed to level his gun, then slumped dead. Clearly this had been the last of the bad ones. Now the town was clean. As folk emerged from the buildings the judge’s daughter ran to the young man and embraced him. The lights came up. Zeberjet and Ekrem stood, and moved with the small crowd toward the exit.
“Good movie, huh, abi?”
“Sure was,” answered Zeberjet with a smile.
What a lot of lying there was in the world. Spoken, written, conveyed through pictures or silence. It would have been child’s play for the town bosses to have that young man killed. But it gave the illusion that something could be accomplished single-handedly, and you went along with it. Outside, the nut stands in front of the office building were still there, and the chestnut man on the corner.
“Where do you live, Ahmet Abi?”
“Near the station. In a twelve-room manor house.”
“Honest? Are all the rooms furnished?”
“You could say so.”
“How many of you are there?”
“Just myself. And a woman who cooks and cleans up.”
They stopped at the crossing. Would he ask the boy over? Carried a key, he’d said. Zeberjet felt his heart pounding. He had the words on the tip of his tongue. “Why not come over for some tea?” “Would you be my guest tonight?” “Tomorrow night….” There were so many ways to put it, so many gestures he could make. He had to choose one. Eyes on the boy’s face, he waited for the first move. Those long lashes, the tilted nose and parted lips. Not like the ones who came with a male partner to the hotel. This boy’s friendliness and warmth were heartfelt. There was no undercurrent of distrust. Zeberjet said good night and rushed across the street, glancing back when he reached the sidewalk. Still there, the boy smiled. Zeberjet waved and turned to walk on. ‘Six paces and I’ll look back. If he’s still there okay, I’ll ask him over. One …, five, six,…seven, eight, nine, ten.’ He stopped and turned his head. The boy was gone. Zeberjet began to hurry. He had the urge. There was a vacant lot and he glanced around. No one in sight. Stepping into the lot he heard a watchman’s whistle nearby, but went ahead anyway and pissed at the foot of the wall.
The hotel was dark, but the CLOSED sign behind the glass could be made out by light from the street lamps. His left hand dipped into his pocket. What was…? He’d meant to give those to Ekrem at the intermission and had forgotten. He took out the key to open the door. “I always carry a few horse-chestnuts in my bag,” the girl had said. Tall, with dark hands. “Hands dark, heart gentle, says a friend of mine.” He locked and barred the door. It was blandly warm inside. He unlocked the room, leaving the lobby lights off, entered, closed the door, and switched on the reading lamp. Sitting on the edge of the bed he removed shoes and socks, then put on the slippers. Cigarettes and matches, taken from his lefthand pocket, went on the bedside table. It was 11:20. He transferred the chestnuts to his righthand pocket, then walked around to the other side of the bed and undressed, leaving his briefs on. After hanging his clothes on the hook he washed his feet and dried them with the hotel towel. He lay down then, first pushing back the quilt. The towel was stretched over the bedstead. That red, yellow and black gamecock had stuck it out to the end. Neck even longer, arcing over. The owner’s face grim. Like the wanted man’s. “Are you dizzy, abi?” The boy had a soft, deep-chested voice. “…and they were set for the hanging but he broke his buddy out. They came riding after them, and when they shot his buddy’s horse down at the pass he had to go on alone. They were about to go through with the hanging in a square when a bullet split the rope. He rode into the mob and swung his buddy up behind as….” The lights had gone out, hiding Ekrem’s face in darkness. The ceiling bulb had stayed on for a week. This was the thirteenth day. It had been around this time of night that the doorbell rang. The front of her coat open. Then in the room, the swell of her black sweater…. Her face was blurred for him now. Dark, with a narrow nose and thin lips. The hair and eyes black, the lashes long. But that could be any of a thousand women. Or men. An ugly old woman, even, an ugly old man. He pressed on his shorts with his right hand, ran it over the fabric. “Hand me that slipper,” Fatihli had said. Zeberjet had been awake, peering out from between his eyelashes. The face looked even more attractive by the dim light of the barracks night-lamp. It was the second time Fatihli and Sergeant Refik had come around. He wasn’t their only target. They pulled the same stunt on others as well. The sentries knew and would tease you the next morning: “Anyone for the showers?” Fatihli had slowly peeled back the army blanket and, using the slipper, had begun stroking the front of Zeberjet’s shorts. It grew quickly toward his navel. At one point Sergeant Refik felt it and choked out, “God, what did he do to deserve this thing?” The slipper strokes came light and rapid. Letting go, Zeberjet gave a kind of delirious moan. “Likes it, doesn’t he,” Sergeant Refik had said. Sometimes when they took breaks Fatihli would look his way. “Come here and fill my canteen.” Or in the barracks, “Go get me some matches.” Or coming up with his rifle, “Why don’t you clean this one while you’re at it.” It used to annoy Corporal Halil. “What are you, his servant?” “No, I go along because I feel like it.” “What good is it to do favors for this thankless bastard?” But it wasn’t favors. He wanted to be near him, and this was the only way. Word had it Fatihli didn’t think much of the local whores and sent for his mistress now and then, from Istanbul, to stay with a certain old woman in town.
He rolled to his left and reached for the cigarettes on the bedside table. The colonialist’s concubine slept on in her painting. “She sleeps, she does sleep, but then she’s hard-workin
g.” He lit up and drew the quilt over him. So she’d be leaving tomorrow. Didn’t realize her uncle was dead. Five or six years ago a villager had brought the news. It seemed the uncle had fallen in getting up from the supper table. On Friday evening, the villager had said. They’d put him to bed, where he died toward morning. When the man asked after Zeynep, Zeberjet said she had left him to find work in Izmir. No one from Sindelli—a small mountain village—was likely to stay at the hotel. The pair of men who had come, three years back, he had turned away. Deliberately he flicked the ash from his cigarette. She lay sleeping now beneath that slant ceiling. It was supposed to have been Chief Maid Kadriyé’s room, a dried-up woman who used to wear her veil even when only the men of the house were around. As a boy he’d heard his mother telling another woman how Rüstem Bey’s wife, Semra Hanim, had been one of Izmir’s beauties in her youth. Known to all as the Adjutant’s daughter. After retiring one night Rüstem Bey had felt like having some of his wife’s strawberry jam. “I’ll go up for some,” she had said. “No, it doesn’t matter.” “It does if you want it,” and she’d gotten out of bed. Climbing the stairs toward the kitchen, slowly to avoid waking the household, she had heard muffled sounds from that room and quietly come up to listen. “Bite my tits too. The nipples.” It was the servant girl’s voice, and a moan had followed. “Oo, not so hard. I’ll yell.” “That’s it, yell and I’ll bite them clean off.” And that had been Chief Maid Kadriyé. All unrepeatable, really. Semra Hanim had completely forgotten about the jam and had gone down, trembling violently as she came into the room (this room). “No time like the present,” she’d told her husband, going on to recount what she had heard. As the two were departing the next morning, bundles under their arms, the servant girl had been weeping. “Don’t you cry, girl,” Kadriyé had said, “we won’t starve. I’ll be right there beside you.”
He stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray. The night lamp let him see the woman in the painting only dimly. She herself, on long hot days with the negro girls, might well…. “You like it, don’t you,” he said in a choked voice. Sitting up he reached the towel from the foot of the bed, bunched it and flung it at the wall, but it unfurled in mid-flight and landed by the wainscoting. He went to gather it up, rubbed and shook it, batting off the more stubborn flakes, and stretched it tightly over the bedstead. Then, nail and all, he yanked the painting down. It left a rectangular, pale ivory after-image on the wall. Opening the curtain and window he shoved the painting out into the yard, then re-shut window and curtain. He noted the small door between the window and the other wall, then turned and went back to the bedside. His arm muscles were tense. Did he mean to lie down? This maroon satin quilt might at one time have covered the Adjutant’s daughter, side by side with Rüstem Bey. What had that balding, gray-haired, loose-jowled, puffy-lidded figure been like in his youth? Impossible to picture. “As a young man my big brother was like whipcord.” So Zeberjet’s mother had always said. Her big brother. In fact they were only nine months apart. As his wife’s confinement neared and he had to stay away from her, Hashim Bey might well have forced, or seduced, that servant girl. When it turned out she was pregnant they hastily married her off to a poor relative, who possibly had deserted her when he saw the light. Would she really leave? He felt the satin. Had they used to throw the quilt off? Rüstem Bey’s brother Faruk, younger by seven years, had taken his own life at the age of nineteen, perhaps out of desperate longing for his sister-in-law. It was three years after Independence. One day toward summer’s end, as the grape harvest was nearing and the entire household had gone to their summer home among the vineyards in Azmakaltı, Faruk left for home telling his mother he’d be back in the morning. She waited until noon the following day, then, deathly pale, asked her husband Hashim Bey to have the team harnessed. “He should have been back.” Her daughter-in-law offered to come along but she told her no, to stay, that Saïdé could come. Riding in the canopied carriage she spoke once, to say “It’s bad with him.” As they opened the door he was there in the stairwell, stretched out long at the end of a rope, with his shoes and summer clothes on and his neck snapped. They screamed, and his mother collapsed where she stood. The driver ran, dodging around the table (this very table?), which lay overturned on the stairs, to take the boy in his arms, and flies rose off the tops of his shoes. Soundlessly, her eyes shut, Nebilé Hanim had then lain in bed, seized with fits of trembling for two days, and died.
He shivered. Rubbed his chest, neck, arms. Leaving the room he stood for some time in contemplation of the stairwell. A car passing outside on the empty avenue sent a tremor through the hotel. He shook his head and went up. He opened the maid’s door, rubbed his face, reached out and turned the light on. Her head and arms lay uncovered. Generally it had been her feet protruding, the soles black. He went over. Her head was bent to the left with the jugular standing out. He felt under the pillow—still there. He pulled off the quilt and hung it over the bedstead at the foot. Her shift was hiked up, her legs apart. He laid a hand on one leg and slid it up. Warmth. He ran his fingers through the hair, cupped his hand, held it there. She stirred then and he stretched out beside her, undoing the buttons. Her stroked her large, tough breasts, and straightened her head. She had crow’s feet, and her forehead was lined. The mouth lay half open—she was breathing regularly—and he reached to kiss it, then slid down and bit one breast.
“Ow. Scat,” she mumbled.
“Would you come awake, girl?”
He looked up and saw she was asleep. Removing his shorts he laid them on the quilt. Not in her sleep. Not anymore. He prodded her with his knee, then shook her. The eyes opened briefly and closed again.
“Are you here, agha?”
“You can’t leave tomorrow. Your uncle’s dead.”
“Dead? My mother?”
“Your uncle. Years ago. One of the villagers told me.”
“It’s a lie.”
“No, it’s true. He’s dead.”
When she lay silent he grabbed her by the shoulders and shook.
“Get up, you. Sit up.”
He hauled her toward him and she put her hands on the mattress for support to sit up. Her face was impassive, turned to the wall with droopy, half-closed eyes. He shook her again.
“Come on, wake up.”
“I am awake, agha.”
“Take off your shift.”
“But that would….”
“I said take it off.”
Alternating sides he managed, with some cooperation, to free the hem from under her. Then he peeled off the shift and hung it over the foot of the bed. She was looking away and trying to keep her upper half covered with her left arm. He forced the arm down and laid his face against her chest. The bed creaked as they fell together. He ignored a pattering underneath it, and lay kissing her neck and breasts. He had an erection, but when he pushed, it softened and refused to go in. He waited a moment, heart pounding, and tested it. Taking his hand away and pushing he felt it go soft, shrink. Ice went through him. He got to his knees and saw that she had her eyes shut. With a lunge he seized her throat. As she jerked violently and opened her eyes, he closed his. Her knee rammed his crotch and he clenched in pain. Something moved in the hardness under his thumbs. He heard a gurgle. Her body lashing, she clung to his wrists and he bore down with all he had, face locked, fingers locked, a roaring in his ears, and the hands went limp around his wrists and all struggling ceased. He loosened his grip and slid down off the bed, only then looking. Her eyes and mouth were open. Sinking to his knees on the floor, he let his head rest against the mattress. His arms ached. He worked his fingers. There was a dryness in his mouth. The roaring in his ears had abated. Something warm and soft brushed against his leg and his head snapped up. The cat. He stroked it, full length from head to tail. The cat, purring and arching its back as he stroked, put its front paws on his leg, digging and releasing with the claws. He could feel the living warmth under his hand. He was getting a hard-on. Shoving the animal away he rose and
went to the door, but after opening it came back to put on his slippers and get his shorts. Then he turned the cat out, switched off the light, stepped into the hall, and shut the door. He walked quickly downstairs to the room. The reading lamp was on. Draping his shorts over the foot of the bed he spread the towel, pulled the pillow into position under it, and lay down. Panting, groaning, he came long and full. The hotel was silent. When he had dried the wetness off he hung the towel over the bedstead again and pulled it taut, then put his shorts on. As he lay down he arranged the pillow and covered himself with the quilt, leaving his arms exposed. His eyes were focused unblinkingly on the round, white lampshade overhead at the end of its lead pipe. A noise came and he leapt out of bed, intent, unbreathing. Upstairs. He ran up barefoot, slowing on the final flight. The cat was scratching at the door of her room. Seeing him it mewed. It liked having her near, and always spent the day around her, but had never begged this way at night when left in the hall. Sometimes when he was on her a sound under the bed, a furious scratching at the linoleum, had startled him, and he had shut the cat out of the room. He turned on the hall light and the animal mewed. What was he going to do with it? Turn it out, it would jump up at the door and windows, possibly yowl. Corner it in the room…. He opened his door and called. The cat meowed. He called again. No luck. With a shake of the head he walked over, opening her door (at the first crack the cat streaked in) to enter. By the hall light, even dimmer here, she looked—yes—asleep, stretched out naked in the middle of the bed. “C’mere.” He picked up a shabby slipper and threw it. The cat darted by and crouched in the corner, to the right of the door. Taking up the copper pitcher from the bedside chest Zeberjet advanced. As he raised the pitcher water spilled onto his shoulder and down his front. The cat shot along the base of the wall, over the chest, and jumped to the window. It scratched at the panes and turned in a crouch, mewing sharply. Its body coiled, the eyes on his. Zeberjet advanced. The cat gave a sudden leap that he met in mid-air with arms raised, but at the collision something slashed his forehead. He froze, deathly pale, and swallowed hard. Slowly he set down the pitcher, moving from the chest to the mirror on the wall. A little scratch was all. He wiped away the drop of blood near his eyebrow. No other bleeding. Amazing how this docile, patient animal could suddenly turn. Zeberjet went slowly to the door, and flattened himself. A scampering under the bed and it darted out into the hall. He put out the light and closed the door behind him. The cat was huddled in a corner. In the kitchen Zeberjet took the smallest of three frying pans down and held it behind his back as he reemerged. He called softly and the cat meowed. Down on one knee he smiled, cajoling, “Here puss, here. No one will hurt you,” and held out his left hand as though offering a scrap. The cat straightened and came slowly out. It rubbed against his hand. Animals forget so easily. He gripped the handle tight, stroking the cat with his free hand and pushing its head away. He raised the pan, snatched his hand off the cat’s neck and struck, immediately jumping to his feet. The cat lay convulsing. Again he struck it on the head. Tail and legs stiffened, there was a rigid trembling, and stillness. One eye stood out of its socket, and blood lay on the linoleum. He set the pan down beside the cat and flexed his fingers. The one before had been a tabby, female. The maid had come to tell him, “The cat’s been missing three days. Will it come back?” “Three days? It’s dead then. You never find their bodies.” So his father had told him. “What’s a hotel without a cat?” He had asked the barber for this one. A tiny thing when he brought it home. Picking it up by the tail he carried it over and opened the window. No one below. He let fly and it landed in the gutter. Cold outside. He shut the window. Then went back to the kitchen with the pan, washed it, hung it up. There was a large pot on the kerosene stove and he leaned to look. Kachamak. His legs gave way and he held onto the stone counter, kneeling to lay his head against its coolness. The quaking in his shoulders gradually stilled. Gripping the counter he heaved himself up. “Absurd,” he said softly. He turned off the kitchen and hall lights and went downstairs. Going toward the bed he spotted his slippers and bent down, placing them on the linoleum under the sink while he washed his feet again. He lay down then and covered himself with the quilt. His gaze was on the lampshade at the end of the lead pipe that hung from the ceiling. One day he’d had her dust it with a cloth while he held the chair steady on the bed, a large copper pan under each leg to protect the quilt. “The hotel is all yours. Make sure you get a woman in.” She had stood tiptoe on the chair with arms raised, her large feet bare and the black-patterned bloomers rolled up. “It’s done, agha.” Stepping down off the chair she had rested one hand on his shoulder for support. “Trim those nails.” This room was swabbed every two weeks even when no one stayed in it. Always ready. Here in the twelve-room manor house. All yours. Where villagers, tobacco farmers in town for the crop payments, Party delegates, dentists, people discharged from the hospital, patients if the hospital was full, newly enlisted soldiers, marketplace vendors, livestock dealers, people with a new job, or looking, teachers, students with an exam to take, lawyers, touring actors, one-night couples, the so-called Retired Officer, the maid, the woman off the delayed…. He sat bolt upright. The doorbell was ringing.