I said to the waiter, “Another beer…” This was the fourth. I was beginning to think my feelings and thoughts were achieving balance. I was neither happy nor despairing anymore. Just as I had no obligation to ensure livelihood and subsistence by working twelve hours a day, I also had no possibility of becoming rich in a legitimate or illegitimate way. With the indefinable supernatural speed of the act of thinking, I was making the accounting, the balance sheet of my life. I wasn’t hungry or needy. If I could expel from my mind the natural desire I felt toward women whose hands appeared whiter and plumper, whose hips appeared wider and more wonderful, whose figures appeared more delicate and handsome, whose lips appeared redder, whose faces appeared more innocent, in this street panorama I was watching from this beer hall window, in these passing figures of wealth and comfort before my clouded eyes, I would be completely at ease. What importance could the most beautiful woman have for me? Since my head, worn out with excessive effort and labor, would ache to the point of cracking after the most lustful embrace of love, the most passionate kiss, and I would remain idle and suffering for a week! There was no need for wealth either. Since I was intolerant of the bestiality of “the reproductive act,” persistently accepted and deemed the goal of presence and pleasure; what would I do with money? It would open new and venereal paths of passion for me that I could never walk. I wasn’t ignorant enough not to be bothered by Platonic embraces either…
I drank the large glass before me in one gulp and said to the waiter again, “Another beer…” This was the fifth… I was looking outside, at this society continuously passing in the relaxation-inducing twilight, this endless ribbon. Carriages, beautiful women, couples, families, solitary people, officers, policemen… vendors… Some were going to amuse themselves, some to work, some to rest. But they were all running after what I supposed myself to be independent of: money, benefit. This was undoubtable! Duty, patriotism, virtue, sacrifice… Even renouncing worldly things was a cover, a thin tulle curtain that couldn’t hide what was underneath from a seeing eye. Under this curtain there was always money and benefit. Only I! Poor sick one, I wasn’t living for it, for money and benefit. But why had I striven until now, smiled? I wanted to say “For knowledge and learning!” Alas! Saying for light and truth, I had continuously run toward darkness and ignorance. What did I learn from Darwin, who in the end admitted like a simple and foolish villager that he was involuntarily subject to the old confidence? Nothing, nothing, nothing… I had to admit that I too was ignorant like everyone! More ignorant than everyone, because they have their hereditary and traditional ideas and beliefs. Whereas mine completely went bankrupt. Collapsed. And I couldn’t replace them with anything. I lost my health. Now I carry a sick and unnatural existence. My growing restlessness and confusion made the burden of this existence heavier. I must confess: I’m being crushed. I want not to think…
Suddenly I completely drank the full, large glass before me. To the waiter who knows what he was thinking looking at me, I said again, “Another beer…” This was the sixth. I shouldn’t drink anymore! I would get sick. Inside myself I was saying, “Since there is death, what value can health have?” No, no! I should get up; or sit without drinking… I took a mecidiye from my pocket to see the bill. A white and dirty, round and engraved piece of silver! Ah, money! Symbol of power! I brought this small idol close to my eyes. As if I was seeing it for the first time. Around it was a circle consisting of crescents whose ends touched each other. Outside these crescents small stars and inside them relatively large stars were placed. In the middle was a tuğra. I suddenly thought. Tuğra… What did this mean? How ignorant I was! I didn’t know the meaning of this. I was looking with the strange curiosity felt in contemplating an unknown thing. Was this a picture? It had two back and three front legs. A bird? No. An insect, a bee? No. A chicken with its feathers plucked? No. A horse rearing up? No. It had no head or tail. Its legs were excessive. Then what was it? A work of art? A marvel of calligraphy? No. It absolutely wasn’t beautiful and proportionate! It gave no emotion, no excitement to the soul. It couldn’t be considered a wonderful work either. What were people “distinguished by the honor of reason” thinking when they made such oddities whose reason couldn’t be explained by any word? What was the calligrapher of this monstrosity thinking in the secrets of his engraving, which would live as long as the impressions of civilization remained on earth? Undoubtedly nothing… Weren’t humans always unconscious, always meaningless, always sick in their works of art anyway? I thought again: Wasn’t my thinking about the meaning and reason for engraving this tuğra similar to the meaningless and innocent curiosity that small children feel before the “squiggles and curlicues” in old alphabet books? Was I still innocent and childlike enough to search for a reasonable meaning, a true reason in everything I saw? No, no, no… There is never any reason, any meaning in anything at any time. Finally, I put the mecidiye back in my vest pocket so as not to see the tuğra that stood ready to jump at my face saying “Know what I am!…” on this small metal stage with its stretched legs. Not to think, to return to natural vegetative silence, mineral inertia depended on drinking not a little but a lot. I rolled down the large glass before me. I shouted at the waiter who was looking with wonder and astonishment at the door of the buffet, watching as if at an unexpected incident my drinking without appetizers.
“Another beer…”
Ömer Seyfettin
