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
“You haven’t swiped your card, young man!”
I woke up from the light reverie with a soft warning from the bus driver. What happened to me? How did I suddenly become like this? I put my hand in my back pocket and took out my wallet, moved the flattened side of the wallet to the card reader which had an arrow picture on it and waited for the mechanical sound but it did not beep. The impatient crowd of passengers behind me was grumbling; some kind of strange agitation bubbling up in my chest. On the foggy windows of the bus, I somehow saw the angry waves of the cold winter days, splashing on the black cliffs.
“If you don’t have a card, you can spend 1 Yuan. Don’t you have any coin in your pocket?”
“I have a card,” I said, with a voice that I only can hear. “I have but sometimes it doesn’t beep.”
Meanwhile, I took my card out of the wallet, got the pink side with the cartoon characters closer to the card reader. A short, meek sound of beep came from the machine. The driver, seeming already gave up on me, was observing the rearview mirror to see the passengers getting off the bus from the back door.
I moved toward the middle of the bus. It was not so crowded so I sat on the seat near the door. Beside me, there was a middle-aged woman talking on the phone, complaining about this and that with an extremely loud voice that everybody on the bus can easily hear every single word she utters.
“Yes, yes, how did the weather warm up so quickly like this? Two days ago I could not leave my home without taking my coat on me. Today, my daughter did not even wear socks, just a skirt, and a light blouse, then off to work she disappeared.”
It wasn’t the warm weather of spring outside, it was the closed windows which made the air inside the bus heavy and unbearable. The habits of the winter were not easy to leave behind. Our minds are full of hesitations, big question marks, “What if the weather gets cold again? Let me wear one sweater on the shirt, just in case! And one pair of wool socks. My legs are warm but my feet are always cold. Why? Is there an answer to every question?”
I put the card back in my wallet. My mind again traveled to the cleaning guy who was wiping the floor of the underpass and how he scolded me for stepping on the section of the floor he has just cleaned. This is probably why I don’t remember how I walked, climbed the stairs and arrived at the BRT stop; as if a part of my memory is cut off from my brain and thrown to the gutters in the underpass. My mind was busy with the question of why I could not give a damn good answer to that old foul-mouthed guy. I wish I would have said “Uncle, don’t walk here, don’t walk there, where are we supposed to walk? Or are we supposed to fly?”
He cleans the floor in vertical lines. I don’t say much as he is an old man, with a slightly bent figure and a face look like a topographical map, complete with plains, rivers and mountains. It feels wrong to create more work for someone who is apparently under a lot of physical burden. Yes, I am tender like this but the tenderer I become the more aggressive he gets. If he cleans left side first, he shouts at the people who walk on the left side. If he cleans the right side first, same thing for the people who walk on the right side. If he shouts at me once, I will not hold myself and shout back at him. “We are all busy people, you idiot!” I will say. “We cannot worry about your job as you don’t give a damn for mine. What difference does it make anyway? Both sides will be dirty within five minutes.” Maybe be I will not use the word idiot but I will say the rest. Will he also shout at me? What can he say? The worst case scenario is he can walk toward me with the mop in his hand. Perhaps he won’t say a word, will be silent like a dog kicked in the stomach. These kinds of men gain their power from those who never stand against and defend themselves. If I; once, only once, stand up and roar, then I know he will shrink like a fruit drying in the summer sun.
The woman next to me is still on the phone, her voice is even higher now. “Yes, yes, I watched it last night. That girl came out too shrewd for that program. At the beginning, she seemed so innocent and naïve. How did she utter those words like that; “Instead of laughing on a bicycle, I would rather cry in a BMW.” I almost lost my mind when I hear these words. I wish my daughter also watched the program. Last night she said she was tired and went to bed very early. Her head is always in the clouds, you know. These days she found a penniless boy, she calls him an artist. Since when playing at bars made someone 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 long time. I couldn’t sleep well last night. Lots of strange dreams hunched over me till morning. I woke up and sent them away but once I doze off again a new one attacked. I have turned over and over on the bed so many times that the total distance I have covered could be at least one lap around Changzhou!
The bus stops, I open my eyes. A few people got on and many got off. One of the passengers is an old man, wearing a worn out black hat, a dirty bag is cross-hanged over his shoulder. His pants are so loose that I think two men of the same size can enter in it. Both his shirt and pants are extremely creased and full of stains. He doesn’t sit although there are empty seats, silently looks through the gray windows.
My eyes, heavy as bombshells, fall again. I take a sip of lukewarm tea from my canteen but it doesn’t help. I see my eyelashes, like the bars of a prison cell, falling off to finish me. I think of the emperor Puyi, who had been divorced by one of his concubines. Perhaps it is because of the documentary I have watched last night, right before going to bed. Is there any other emperor in the entire history of mankind who has been divorced by his concubine? Should I be embarrassed about this situation as a Chinese man or should I be proud of him for his modern and non-sexist attitude?
- Bang!
The loud explosion-like noise vibrates in the entire bus, pure and echoless. A young girl screams, a baby starts crying, a boy –probably a high school student- shouts “move, move, move away!” At first, I don’t really understand what’ve just happened. There is a dense crowd right in front of me but still other than this nothing seems unusual. Then I see the legs of the old man who just got on the bus, a few steps away from my seat, near the door. The tip of his feet are perpendicular to the floor, the heels are like the north ends of a magnet. At that moment I realize that the old man is lying on the floor.
I stood up and enter the crowd. As the bus keeps moving, almost everyone is having difficulty in standing. The old man is on the floor, faced down, one arm is stretched to the front direction of the bus, the other one is under his belly. He doesn’t move at all. We are not even sure if he is breathing. Some passengers pass by the man on the floor –careful about not stepping on him- and move toward the seats at the back of the bus. A child asks his mother, “Did he die, mama?” Mother catches him from his arm and pulls near the empty area next to the garbage bin which looks like an overfilled beer glass of Friday nights, with all those white foams accumulated during the previous weekdays.
“Don’t touch him, maybe he has a deadly disease and it could be contagious.” says a young girl. “What disease are you talking about? He is just an old man. When the bus had a sudden brake he could not hold the pole and fell on the floor. That is all.” says a young boy, “Help me pulling him up and making him sit.” A middle-aged man interrupts with a wise voice, “Do not get involved! Otherwise, you will be held responsible for any wrong-doing. He can sue you. You know, he can sue you millions of…” A passenger near the front of the bus asks the driver for a quick advice. “I don’t know!” the driver responds hastily, “I already lost a lot of time at the bus stops. If I stop now I cannot reach the terminal station on time and the entire schedule will be delayed.”
I cannot bear it anymore, I squat down. Tapping the shoulder of the old man gently, asking him “Hey, uncle! Are you ok?” No sound comes from him, except the growling mixed with the rumble of the engine beneath the floor. I tap his shoulder once more. “Hey, uncle, can you talk? Do you need help?” This time I can spot his chest as the source of the growling. “He might be epileptic.” says the woman who was talking on the phone a few minutes ago. “Is epilepsy contagious?” asks the young girl, with the eyes full of fear. The woman laughs, “No, it is not. But still, I will not get involved. In any case, it is hard to know what transmits and what doesn’t in this country. Don’t you watch the news? What strange things happening every day!”
When I see two young men at my both sides, I tell them “Help me please, let’s pull him up and get him to that seat.” They seem reluctant but somehow feel convinced that it is wrong to leave the old man on the floor. Three of us, hold the old man’s shoulders and lift him up. Meanwhile, the girl who seemed to be very worried about getting a disease was holding a tissue paper on old man’s head. His forehead hit one of the metal bolts or screws on the floor, the blood oozing from his forehead, comes down to his nose and after getting enough weight as a little red bead, it drops on his shirt. The screams are now replaced with “Give him a piece of tissue paper, give him a seat.” Slowly we take the old man to one of the seats next to the window, right across the door.
“Thank you, thank you so much.” murmurs the old man. He is not himself yet, keeps mumbling incomprehensible words. With the tissue paper, I took from the young girl, I wipe his forehead and tilt his head back so that the blood will stop flowing down. “Uncle, keep your head this way so it won’t bleed a long time.”
“Thank you, thank you so much,” he says repeatedly as if he doesn’t know any other word but this time his voice is stronger and clearer. He really means it and he is truly conscious. He leans his head on the iron bar behind the seat and presses the tissue paper on his wound. Dark bloodstains spread on the tissues like the waves on a calm lake, his fingers are now purple with the mixture of dirt and blood. When the bus stops, the two young men who just helped me get off and walk away without looking back once. The young girl, who gave me the tissue paper, puts the entire pack in my hand and finds a seat at the back of the bus. At that moment I notice that I am the only person left behind to take care of the old man. Looking at the people on the bus, they seem quite indifferent to what has just happened. The bus continues its journey from one end of the city to the other end, carrying people from home to work like in any other day, as if there was no old man who just fell off the floor, nobody injured his head, and nobody might need further assistance. I somehow insist helping the old man all by myself, without knowing why.
“This happens whenever I don’t take my medicine.” says the old man, his eyes tangentially touches my eyes. With a caution of not taking so much responsibility on myself, I move to my seat, get my bag and hang it over my shoulder. I feel that the old man is watching me, like a wounded deer that needs more than just being saved from the wolf’s teeth. “Do not leave me, all have gone but you! Please!” says with his tenacious and aggrieved stare. I move back and stand next to him.
“What is wrong with you, uncle? What is your sickness?” I asked, like I 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 did not have enough money so I couldn’t buy. If I don’t take the medicine, the attacks like this never let me have a normal day. As you see…” He points the black bloodstains on his shirt while pressing the weakness of his voice with a gesture of a hand. From the dialect he speaks, I can easily infer that he is not from Changzhou. He is either from the South or from the West.
“Don’t you have a son or daughter? Don’t they look after you?”
An inner voice is speaking to me “Why waste your time? You should do same as others did. Get off the bus at the next stop. You can take the bus right behind this one. It is free of charge anyway.” I silence this evil voice as quick as possible but it doesn’t die, just turns back to its dormant state, to resurrect at 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 the plastic wastes from the garbage bins.” With the dry parts of the tissue, he cleans the blood from the edge of his lips. I somehow sense the warm metallic taste in my mouth.
“So where are you going now? What will you do in Xinbei?” I can see that he is not so happy with my questions. I hear his inner voice is speaking, “Why do you ask many questions? All you did was to lift me up and help me sit here.”
“What will I do in Xinbei?” Nothing, I go to Xinbei every morning. I start collecting plastic bottles in Xinbei and walk all day toward Tianning. There is a guy near the temple who buys what I collect and pays me money. Usually, I make 20-30 Yuan. If I am lucky I can make up to 50 Yuan. In recent months, it got more challenging.”
“How did it become challenging? You say it because the weather gets warmer?”
“No, no, the number of immigrants increased. Most of them are younger and healthier than me. By the time I finish one round, they start the third and leave me nothing. Because of this, I have to start as early as possible.”
“Ok, ok, I got it.” A thorny pendulum in my head swings between stupidity and conscience. I think of the how it is possible that the immigrants who came earlier treat the latecomers as second-class citizens. The door of the bus opens, some get off but no one gets on. There are very few passengers now. One more time I consider getting off, just throw myself out and forget the entire experience as if it never happened. I will never see this old man again, he will never see me.
“And like I don’t have enough problems in life, I have this disease too. If I had 90 Yuan yesterday, I would have bought my medicine and I would not have the epileptic attack this morning. I wouldn’t have fallen off the floor like a rotten tree falling with the first breeze of the autumn.“
“So you need 90 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 is growing like a giant avalanche ready to fall. The more I try to ignore these hesitations the more they stick their teeth into the flesh of my consciousness.
“Yes, yes, only 90 Yuan. Look, there is a pharmacy right behind the next bus stop. I usually buy my medicine from that place.”
A cold smile spreads on his face. His eyes glitter with the strong sunlight coming from the window. I feel like I am being drowned in that flood of shimmer. Whichever direction I stare at I see colorful threads wrapping my body, turning me into a solid rainbow. With all these images passing through my eyesight, I take my wallet from my back pocket. Trying to hide from other passengers, I take 100 Yuan and give it to the old man. I don’t know how and why I am doing this. The inner voice speaks again, “You cannot live a life while worrying every bit of details of other people’s pain.” It is not a little amount, almost half of my daily wage. But if I am not going help someone who is in need of help, why do I earn that money anyway, why do I call myself a social being? A fresh sprout emerges at the middle of my heart. The sentence “You cannot be a bad person by doing the right thing.” echoes within the inner surface of my head, like the colossal iron bells of the Buddhist pagodas.
“Take this money and buy your medicine. Don’t fall like this again. With the remaining 10 Yuan, ask the pharmacist to clean your forehead, put there some cream and close it with a bandage. If it gets infected, you will have another trouble.”
The old man keeps the red banknote in his palm, squeezes it like he is holding an expensive piece of jewelry. “Thank you so much, son! I hope you will be a very rich man in the future, you will be very lucky and very successful, you can buy a beautiful car and a large house and …”
When the bus stops, he gets ready to stand from his seat. “So, he is leaving now? This quick?” the voice in my head says. “He got the money so he can go now!” I feel guilty of these thoughts. The very same thorny pendulum, the everlasting shuttle of my rational mind, the rope which cannot be tied to the bolts of my conscience.
I hold his arm and help him, walk with him till the door. While one of my arms wraps the pole, my other hand holds his elbow so that he will not fall while getting off. Once the door close, I get back to my seat and watch him walking toward the exit of the BRT station. There are five more stops to my work. I watch the streets and the people through the part of the window that I wiped with my hand so that I can forget what has just happened. The woodpecker in my head, dig into the dense bark of the tree, no matter how thick it is, no matter how hard.
“Did you just give him a 100 Yuan?” asks a familiar voice right behind me. I turn back and see her face. The woman who used to sit next to me when I first entered the bus, staring at me with the eyes which are not relenting me but more like humiliating my silly naivety.
“Yes, he wanted to buy medicine so he needed money,” I say, my voice sounds like I am defending myself although I know I don’t have to explain what I just did to anyone. How did she see me giving money to the old man, anyway? Wasn’t she talking on the phone?
“Ahh”, she bemoans to the man who is wearing black sunglasses, sitting on the left side of the bus. “The youth of this time doesn’t know the value of the money. Having a tender heart is same as being stupid.” She doesn’t even try to decrease the volume of her voice. Perhaps, she deliberately makes this so I can hear her very well.
The man with the sunglasses approves with a nod, “Yes, yes, if your parents ask for 100 Yuan, you wouldn’t give. You would create a lot of excuses. But when a beggar asks for it, you drop all your weapons without hesitation. He is healthier than me, faking from beginning to end. There are many like him in Changzhou in these days. Most of them are not even from this city. They come from other provinces, from Yunnan, Tibet, Xingjian… Go to People’s Park if you don’t believe me, there is a new drama every day. Some faint, drop dead, hit the floor with their foreheads repeatedly, write long stories of their miserable life; force the people to pity them and help them. Once they get the money, they disappear and next day they pop up in another park, playing another trick.”
I turn my face to the window. My hands look for the headphone in my pockets but at that moment I realize that I left them on the bookshelf at home, next to my mask and bicycle lock. “Damn it,” I say with my lips open slightly, “just happens on the day I need them the most!”
“Yes, yes, you are right!” says the woman. “They have all sorts of tricks. Especially the old ones try every possible lie in order to extract money from the young kids. Once they see a prey like this young man, they don’t lose a second. Like a hyena you know, always prey on the weakest one. The young people of these days, they never raise their head from their phones so they don’t have any idea about what is going on around the world. As they keep looking at their fingertips all the time, they ignore the real world revolving right at the tip of their noses.”
The man with sunglasses seems like he is falling behind the words of the woman so he rushes to add more. “As you say, like a hyena or like a vulture, once they spot a small rabbit or a woolgathering gazelle, they don’t forgive. If they dress well, that is enough for qualifying as a good prey. These white collars are so naïve, do you know that? They make money so easily that they don’t mind wasting it. And the beggars know this the best.”
The door of the bus opens again. “Four more stops,” I say to myself. Two students enter the bus. One of the students cannot swipe his card, the beep sound does not come. “It is not my card then, it is the machine which needs to be fixed.”
The woman behind me, “If my daughter does such a thing…”
The driver seems reluctant to move before hearing the beep sound. The door next to me is still open.
“I would scold her so much that…”
The student tries to remove his card from his wallet. Once he realizes that his card is not in the wallet, 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 from which surface it is coming from. In the BRT station, I see the rusty green poles, the screen showing the bus schedule, an old lady going to morning shopping…
“She wouldn’t even imagine of giving 1 Yuan to a beggar.”
I throw myself out. As swift as a cat, without a plan, without a consciousness! The door closes after me. With the fresh air hitting my face, I first give a long breath, as if I kept it in my lungs for a long time. I empty whatever accumulated in my body cells, together with all their sediments. Dense smoke comes out from my mouth and my nose. The defeats and the decisions which can be considered as losses deflate like a soft balloon slowly giving out air. Once I feel that I am empty again, free from all the residuals of the unexpected high tides of the morning, I breathe in and fill my lungs with air. Then I sit on the bench, wait for the next bus.
There is an old man sitting next to me. He peels an apple with a penknife. The pieces of peels drop on the floor of the BRT stop. I feel a new quake in me, some waves retrieve some new ones emerge. Should I warn this man? No, I just wait without motion. The bus arrives as if it wants to save me from a second trouble. Without uttering a single word to the old man, I stand up and get on the bus. Inside my head, I believe in one thing, “It will be different this time.”
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: Short Stories from Modern China” in Turkish.
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