THE PENDULUM*

Çanco'da İngilizce olarak yayımlanan bir dergi için öykülerimden birisini çevirdim. Aşağıdaki metin editörün elinden geçmeden önceki hali. Çeviri bu hengâmede kaybolmasın diye buraya koyuyorum. Düzeltilerden sonra değiştiririm. 

AA

                     

                                                             THE PENDULUM*

“You haven’t swiped your card, young man!”

The bus driver’s mild reprimand pulled me out of a shallow reverie. What had come over me? How had I become this way—this gauzy, half-dreaming thing? I reached into my back pocket, retrieved my wallet, and pressed its flattened side against the card reader marked with a little arrow. I waited for the mechanical beep. It did not come. Behind me, the impatient crowd grumbled, and some strange agitation began to bubble in my chest. On the fogged windows of the bus, I thought I saw angry winter waves splashing against black cliffs.

“If you don’t have a card, you can pay one yuan. Don’t you have any coins?”

“I have a card,” I said, in a voice only I could hear. “I do. Sometimes it just doesn’t beep.”

I took the card out of the wallet, turned its pink side—the one with the cartoon characters—toward the reader. A short, meek beep finally came from the machine. The driver, who had already given up on me, was now watching the rearview mirror for passengers getting off at the back door.

I moved to the middle of the bus. It wasn’t very crowded, so I sat on a seat near the door. Beside me, a middle-aged woman was talking on her phone, complaining about this and that in a voice so loud that every word she uttered was audible to everyone on board.

“Yes, yes, how did the weather warm up so fast? Two days ago, I couldn’t leave the house without my coat. Today my daughter didn’t even wear socks—just a skirt and a light blouse, and off she went to work.”

It wasn’t spring warmth outside. It was the closed windows that made the air inside the bus heavy and almost unbearable. The habits of winter are not easily shed. Our minds fill with hesitations, with great question marks: What if the cold returns? So we wear one sweater over our shirt, just in case. And wool socks. My legs are warm, but my feet are always cold. Why? Must every question have an answer?

I put the card back in my wallet. My mind drifted again to the cleaning man in the underpass, the one who had scolded me for stepping on the section of floor he had just washed. That was probably why I could no longer remember how I had walked, climbed the stairs, and arrived at the BRT stop—as if a slice of my memory had been cut away and thrown into the gutters. My mind was busy with the question of why I could not give that foul-mouthed old man a proper answer. I wished I had said: Uncle, if we can’t walk here and we can’t walk there, where are we supposed to walk? Are we supposed to fly?

He cleans the floor in vertical lines. I don’t say much because he is an old man, slightly bent, his face a topographical map of plains, rivers, and mountains. It feels wrong to create more work for someone already under such a physical burden. Yes, I am tender like this—but the more tender I become, the more aggressive he gets. If he cleans the left side first, he shouts at those who walk on the left. If he cleans the right side first, he shouts at those who walk on the right. If he shouts at me once more, I tell myself, I will not hold back. We are all busy people, you idiot! I will say. We cannot worry about your job, since you don’t give a damn about mine. What difference does it make anyway? Both sides will be dirty again in five minutes. Perhaps I won’t say idiot, but I will say the rest. Would he shout back? What could he say? The worst that could happen: he walks toward me, mop in hand. Or perhaps he says nothing, falls silent as a kicked dog. Men like him draw their power from those who never stand up for themselves. If I—once, only once—stand up and roar, I know he will shrink like fruit drying in the summer sun.

The woman beside me is still on the phone, her voice even higher now. “Yes, yes, I watched it last night. That girl turned out far too shrewd for that program. At the beginning, she seemed so innocent, so naïve. Then she said: ‘I would rather cry in a BMW than laugh on a bicycle.’ I nearly lost my mind when I heard it. I wish my daughter had watched it too. Last night she said she was tired and went to bed early. Her head is always in the clouds, you know. These days, she has found herself a penniless boy—she calls him an artist. Since when does playing in restaurants and bars make someone an artist? I don’t know what to do. I don’t say much, but her father will never let her marry that poor boy.”

Despite the noise around me, I cannot keep my eyes open for long. I didn’t sleep well last night. Strange dreams hunched over me until morning. I would wake and send them away, but as soon as I dozed off, a new one attacked. I turned over and over in bed so many times that the total distance I covered must have been at least one lap around Changzhou.

The bus stops. I open my eyes. A few people get on; many get off. One of the new passengers is an old man in a worn black hat, a dirty bag slung across his shoulder. His pants are so loose that I think two men of the same size could fit inside them. His shirt and trousers are deeply creased and stained. He doesn’t sit, even though there are empty seats. He simply stands and stares silently through the grey window.

My eyes, heavy as bombshells, fall shut again. I take a sip of lukewarm tea from my canteen, but it does nothing. I see my own eyelashes, like the bars of a prison cell, descending to finish me off. I think of Emperor Puyi, who was divorced by one of his concubines. Probably because of the documentary I watched last night before bed. Is there any other emperor in all of human history who was divorced by his own concubine? Should I, as a Chinese man, be embarrassed by this—or proud of him for his modern, non-sexist attitude?

-          Paaat.

The loud, explosive sound vibrates through the entire bus—pure, echoless. A young girl screams. A baby starts crying. A boy, probably a high school student, shouts, “Move, move, move away!” At first, I didn’t understand what had happened. A dense crowd has gathered right in front of me, but otherwise nothing seems unusual. Then I see the legs of the old man who just got on—a few steps from my seat, near the door. The tips of his feet are perpendicular to the floor; his heels are like the north ends of a magnet. And then I realize: the old man is lying on the floor.

 I stand and push into the crowd. The bus keeps moving, and almost everyone struggles to keep their balance. The old man lies face down, one arm stretched toward the front of the bus, the other tucked under his belly. He does not move at all. We are not even sure he is breathing. Some passengers step around him—careful not to tread on him—and move toward the seats in the back. A child asks his mother, “Did he die, Mama?” The mother catches him by the arm and pulls him toward an empty space near the garbage bin, which looks like an overfilled beer glass on a Friday night, all white foam accumulated over the week.

“Don’t touch him,” says a young girl. “Maybe he has a deadly disease. It could be contagious.”

“What disease are you talking about?” says a young boy. “He’s just an old man. The bus braked suddenly, and he couldn’t hold the pole, and he fell. That’s all. Help me pull him up and sit him down.”

A middle-aged man interrupts with a wise voice: “Do not get involved. Otherwise, you’ll be held responsible for anything that goes wrong. He could sue you. You know, he could sue you for millions of…”

A passenger near the front asks the driver for advice. “I don’t know!” the driver answers hastily. “I’ve already lost too much time at the stops. If I stop now, I won’t reach the terminal on time, and the whole schedule will be delayed.”

I cannot bear it any longer. I squat down. I tap the old man’s shoulder gently. “Hey, Uncle. Are you okay?”

 No sound comes from him except a low growling that mixes with the rumble of the engine beneath the floor. I tap his shoulder again. “Hey, Uncle. Can you talk? Do you need help?” This time, I can tell that the growling is coming from his chest.

“He might be epileptic,” says the woman who was on the phone a few minutes ago.

“Is epilepsy contagious?” asks the young girl, her eyes full of fear.

The woman laughs. “No, it’s not. But still, I’m not getting involved. In any case, it’s hard to know what transmits and what doesn’t in this country. Don’t you watch the news? The strange things that happen every day!”

I see two young men on either side of me. “Help me, please,” I tell them. “Let’s pull him up and get him to that seat.” They seem reluctant, but they are convinced, somehow, that it is wrong to leave the old man on the floor. The three of us hold his shoulders and lift him. Meanwhile, the girl who was so afraid of catching a disease holds a tissue to the old man’s head. His forehead struck one of the metal bolts or screws on the floor. Blood oozes from the wound, runs down to his nose, gathers into a little red bead, and drops onto his shirt. The screams have now been replaced by calls of “Give him a tissue! Give him a seat!” Slowly, we move the old man to a seat by the window, directly across from the door.

“Thank you, thank you so much,” murmurs the old man. He is not yet himself; he keeps mumbling incomprehensible words. With the tissue the young girl gave me, I wipe his forehead and tilt his head back so the blood will stop flowing down. “Uncle, keep your head this way. It won’t bleed for long.”

“Thank you, thank you so much,” he says again, as if he knows no other words—but this time his voice is stronger, clearer. He means it, and he is truly conscious. He leans his head against the iron bar behind the seat and presses the tissue to his wound. Dark blood spreads across the tissue like ripples on a calm lake. His fingers turn purple with a mixture of dirt and blood.

When the bus stopped, the two young men who helped me get off and walk away without looking back once. The young girl who gave me the tissue puts the whole pack into my hand and finds a seat at the back. And then I notice: I am the only one left to care for the old man. Looking at the people on the bus, they seem utterly indifferent to what has just happened. The bus continues its journey from one end of the city to the other, carrying people from home to work as on any other day, as if no old man had fallen, no head had been injured, and no one might need further help. And yet I insist on helping him alone, without quite knowing why.

“This happens whenever I don’t take my medicine,” the old man says. His eyes briefly touch mine. Cautious not to take on too much responsibility, I move to my seat, grab my bag, and hang it over my shoulder. I feel the old man watching me, like a wounded deer that needs more than just rescue from the wolf’s teeth. “Do not leave me,” he says, with a tenacious, aggrieved stare. “All have gone, but you. Please!”

I move back and stand beside him.

“What is wrong with you, Uncle? What is your sickness?” I ask, as if I had stopped a random child on the street and asked his name, expecting a sincere and true answer.

“I am epileptic. I had to buy medicine, but yesterday I didn’t have enough money, so I couldn’t. If I don’t take it, the attacks never let me have a normal day. As you see…” He points to the black bloodstains on his shirt, pressing the weakness of his voice down with a gesture of his hand. From his dialect, I can tell he is not from Changzhou. He is either from the south or the west.

“Don’t you have a son or daughter? Doesn’t anyone look after you?”

An inner voice speaks to me: Why are you wasting your time? Do what the others did. Get off at the next stop. You can take the bus right behind this one. It’s free anyway. I silence this evil voice as quickly as I can, but it does not die. It only returns to a dormant state, waiting to resurrect another time.

“I don’t have a son or daughter. I had a son, but he died in a traffic accident. My wife died of cancer last year. I am all alone in this world. I collect plastic waste from garbage bins.” With the dry part of the tissue, he cleans the blood from the edge of his lips. I almost taste the warm metal in my own mouth.

“So, where are you going now? What will you do in Xinbei?”

I can see that he is not happy with my questions. I hear his inner voice: Why do you ask so many questions? All you did was lift me up and sit me here.

“What will I do in Xinbei?” he says aloud. “Nothing. I go to Xinbei every morning. I start collecting plastic bottles there and walk all day toward Tianning. There’s a man near the temple who buys what I collect and pays me. Usually, I make twenty or thirty yuan. If I’m lucky, I can make up to fifty. Lately, it’s gotten harder.”

“How so? Because the weather is getting warmer?”

“No, no. The number of migrants has increased. Most of them are younger and healthier than me. By the time I finish one round, they have already started their third, and they leave me nothing. Because of this, I have to start as early as possible.”

 “Okay, okay. I understand.”

A thorny pendulum swings in my head between stupidity and conscience. I think of how those who came earlier treat the latecomers as second-class citizens. The bus doors open. Some get off, but no one gets on. There are very few passengers now. Once more, I consider getting off—just throwing myself out and forgetting the whole experience as if it had never happened. I will never see that old man again. He will never see me.

“And as if I didn’t have enough problems,” he continues, “I have this disease too. If I had had ninety yuan yesterday, I would have bought my medicine, and I wouldn’t have had an attack this morning. I wouldn’t have fallen to the floor like a rotten tree falling with the first breeze of autumn.”

“So, you need ninety yuan? Is that all?”

My mind is full of question marks, full of scorpions invading the curves of my brain. The hesitation in my chest grows like a giant avalanche ready to fall. The more I try to ignore these hesitations, the deeper they sink their teeth into the flesh of my consciousness.

“Yes, yes. Only ninety yuan. Look—there is a pharmacy right behind the next bus stop. I usually buy my medicine there.”

A cold smile spreads across his face. His eyes glitter with the strong sunlight coming through the window. I feel myself drowning in that flood of shimmer. Whichever direction I look, I see colorful threads wrapping around my body, turning me into a solid rainbow.

With all these images passing before my eyes, I take my wallet from my back pocket. Trying to hide from the other passengers, I take out one hundred yuan and give it to the old man.

I don’t know how or why I am doing this. The inner voice speaks again: You cannot live a life worrying about every bit of other people’s pain. It is not a small amount — almost half my daily wage. But if I am not going to help someone in need, why do I earn money at all? Why do I call myself a social being? A fresh sprout emerges in the middle of my heart. The sentence You cannot be a bad person by doing the right thing echoes across the inner surface of my skull like the colossal iron bells of a Buddhist pagoda.

“Take this money and buy your medicine. Don’t fall like this again. With the remaining ten yuan, ask the pharmacist to clean your forehead, put on some ointment, and close it with a bandage. If it gets infected, you’ll have another problem.”

 The old man holds the red banknote in his palm and squeezes it as if it were an expensive piece of jewelry. “Thank you so much, son. I hope you will be a very rich man in the future. Very lucky and very successful. You will buy a beautiful car and a large house and…”

The bus stops. He gets ready to stand.

So. he’s leaving now? That quickly? the voice in my head says. He got the money, so he can go. I feel guilty of these thoughts. The same thorny pendulum, the everlasting shuttle of my rational mind—the rope that cannot be tied to the bolts of my conscience.

I hold his arm and help him. I walk with him to the door. With one arm wrapped around the pole and the other holding his elbow, I steady him as he steps off. Once the door closes, I return to my seat and watch him walk toward the exit of the BRT station.

There are five more stops until my work. I watch the streets and the people through the part of the window I have wiped with my hand, trying to forget what has just happened. The woodpecker in my head digs into the dense bark of the tree, no matter how thick it is, no matter how hard.

“Did you just give him one hundred yuan?”

A familiar voice, right behind me. I turn. The woman who had sat beside me when I first boarded is staring at me—not with sympathy, but with something that looks like scorn for my silly naïveté.

“Yes,” I say. My voice sounds defensive, though I know I don’t have to explain myself to anyone. How did she see me give the money, anyway? Wasn’t she on her phone?

“Ahh,” she bemoans to a man in dark sunglasses sitting on the left side of the bus. “The youth of today don’t know the value of money. Having a tender heart is the same as being stupid.” She doesn’t even try to lower her voice. Perhaps she wants me to hear.

The man in sunglasses nods in agreement. “Yes, yes. If your parents asked for one hundred yuan, you wouldn’t give it. You would make excuses. But when a beggar asks, you drop your weapons without hesitation. That man is healthier than me. Faking it from beginning to end. There are many like him in Changzhou these days. Most of them aren’t even from this city. They come from other provinces—Yunnan, Tibet, Xinjiang. Go to People’s Park if you don’t believe me. There’s a new drama every day. Some faint, some drop dead, some hit their foreheads on the floor repeatedly, some write long stories of their miserable lives. They force people to pity them and help them. Once they get the money, they disappear. The next day they pop up in another park, playing another trick.”

 I turn my face to the window. My hands search my pockets for my headphones, but then I realize I left them on the bookshelf at home, next to my mask and my bicycle lock. Damn it, I say with slightly parted lips. Just happens on the day I need them most.

“Yes, yes, you are right,” says the woman. “They have all kinds of tricks. Especially the old ones. They try every possible lie to extract money from young people. Once they see a prey like this young man, they don’t lose a second. Like a hyena—always preying on the weakest. Young people these days never raise their heads from their phones, so they have no idea what’s going on in the world. As they keep looking at their fingertips, they ignore the real world revolving right under their noses.”

The man in sunglasses, afraid of falling behind the woman’s words, rushes to add more. “As you say: like a hyena, or a vulture. Once they spot a small rabbit or a woolgathering gazelle, they don’t forgive. If the prey dresses well, that’s enough. These white-collar workers are so naïve. They make money so easily that they don’t mind wasting it. And the beggars know this best.”

The bus doors open again. Four more stops, I tell myself. Two students enter. One of them cannot swipe his card. The beep does not come. “It’s not my card, then,” he says. “It’s the machine that needs fixing.”

The woman behind me: “If my daughter ever did such a thing…”

The driver seems reluctant to move before hearing the beep.

The door beside me is still open.

“I would scold her so much that…”

The student tries to remove his card from his wallet. When he realizes it is not there, he asks his friend, “Swipe for me too, please.”

I look at the flickering light reflections on the ceiling of the bus, trying to figure out which surface they are coming from. In the BRT station, I see the rusty green poles, the screen showing the bus schedule, and an old woman going to the morning market.

“She wouldn’t even imagine giving one yuan to a beggar.”

I throw myself out.

As swift as a cat. Without a plan. Without consciousness.

 The door closes behind me. Fresh air hits my face. First, I take a long breath, as if I had been holding it in my lungs for ages. I exhale whatever has accumulated in my body cells, together with all their sediments. Dense smoke pours from my mouth and nostrils. The defeats and the decisions that might be counted as losses deflate like a soft balloon slowly giving up air. When I feel empty again—free from all the residuals of the unexpected high tides of the morning—I breathe in and fill my lungs. Then I sit on the bench and wait for the next bus.

An old man sits beside me. He is peeling an apple with a penknife. The pieces of peel drop onto the floor of the BRT stop. I feel a new quake inside me. Some waves retreat; new ones emerge. Should I warn him? No. I sit motionless. The bus arrives, as if to save me from a second trouble. Without a single word to the old man, I stand and board.

Inside my head, I believe one thing: This time will be different.

The card does not beep again.

 

                        Ali Rıza Arıcan – June, 2014

                Translated from Turkish by Ali Rıza Arıcan

 

 * Originally published in 2016 in the short story collection called “The Blue of the Hazy City: The Stories from Modern China” in Turkish.