The One-Eyed Tailor

By  Filiz Turhan

The one-eyed tailor sat in his parked car. A rough groan emanated from deep in his throat and he seemed to float away on it, rolling and tumbling like the satellites orbiting the Earth that he had once seen on a TV program. For long minutes he allowed himself to just turn and turn and turn. 

Slowly, he came back into his body. He wondered if he opened his eyes a bit, without moving his neck, could he turn the ignition on his Camaro and ease the car out of the parking lot and towards home? Once in his own driveway, he thought he might be able to will himself out of the car and up the three-step front stoop. Then he could collapse on the other side of the front door. It was still early in the morning and his wife wouldn’t be home from her dress shop until 6:30pm. That was a long time to lie on the floor, but he didn’t care, just as long as he was safely in his own home and lying still. These days he had no idea when his teenagers would be home. They always seemed to be doing something at school well into the evenings. They came and went, babbling in English about things he hardly understood, flashing their report cards in front of his good eye every few months. If he did manage to get himself home, he hoped neither of them came in before his wife to see him on the floor.

He experimented by slashing his eyes open an infinitesimal amount, just to let a little light in and steady his gaze on the steering wheel in front of him. That helped a bit, but no way could he turn the ignition. 

The vertigo attacks came on without warning, sudden and strong, like the finger of Allah flipping a switch in his brain, just because He could. 

That morning he had left the house as usual, driven down the highway, turning this way and that, the roads familiar and reliable. After two decades on Long Island, he knew his way around. He pulled into the parking lot of Selden Cleaners, the first stop on his daily tour. He was a fast worker, and there was never enough work at one cleaners or men’s shop to occupy him for long, so he traveled to three or four shops, six days a week for upwards of twelve hours a day. He liked the work and the change of scenery. He loved driving his Camaro and clocked many miles a week. He especially loved sitting at his dining room table on Saturday nights, tallying the week’s receipts on his clickety-clack adding machine. He was paid by the piece. 

He thought of all the cutting, sewing, and pressing that awaited him inside. When new customers came in, he would come around from the worktable so he could do a fitting, pinning up sleeves or taking in a waistband. How he wished he was inside, chalking a hemline with a ruler. How satisfying and reassuring the chalk line would be, white and razor sharp across a black wool trouser leg. It was a beautiful line. A line to rely on. A line strong enough to buy a house, to feed a family, to anchor his spinning head. He focused all his mental energy on the chalk line in his imagination. For a minute he thought it was working, but then the tilting reasserted itself. He felt something coming and with no other options, he snatched the cap off his head, (handmade by himself) and retched violently into it. After recovering his breath, he laughed at himself, remembering how he had prided himself on the cap, the fine flannel he had chosen and the care in the making of it. 

He sat very still, balancing the cap in his lap. Not a drop had splattered anywhere else. He was stealthy by nature, able to rise very early in the morning, groom himself, and glide out the door without a peep, without awakening any of his sleeping family or even that hapless friend of his son who had been living in their basement. 

People were walking across the parking lot, going into the cleaners, emerging with their starched shirts and pressed pleats. He wondered if they knew how lucky they were to be able to walk a straight line and go about their daily activities while he was pinned there helplessly to the seat of his car. He could not understand why, after enduring so much already, this new thing had begun to plague him, these spinning attacks and diabolical headaches. 

He spun around thirty degrees and saw himself back on the farm in the time before his father died, vivid in the darkness of his memory though it was forty years ago. 

His mother worked the farm and his father had a small general store not far from it, situated right on the coast of the Black Sea near the city of Trabzon. His father would load up his truck with goods and drive to the isolated communities scattered in the low hills of eastern Turkey. While he was away on one such trip, a storm had blown in and washed the store, all its stock, and most infamously, the store’s credit ledger, into the sea. Not a single man in the area would later admit to owing a balance on his flour-sugar-soap-coffee bill. 

After that disaster, his father was even more remote and unpredictable than he had been before. For the tailor, it was all symbolized in the single most memorable event of his early life. He had had a drilling pain in his ear. His nose was runny, but he was unable to breathe through it. Someone made him lie down on the massive hearth. His mother was touching him. He could feel her entire body trembling, one hand on his burning forehead and the other poking the pointy end of a rolled-up-into-a-cone newspaper deep into his ear. The wide end was high above him…and it was on fire. Charred bits of paper flew down onto his face. Other faces floated above him; other hands also held him down. He couldn’t stop screaming, the sound of his own voice muffled like some faraway echo. It seemed to go on forever, when abruptly, his mother was shoved out of the way and his father was towering over him. He saw baba’s arm go up in an arc and come down in a swift metallic flash. 

The oil can made contact with the hand covering his aching ear, shattering his finger and stunning him into a cataclysmic silence that continued to engulf his right ear till this day, decades later. He looked at the finger through his barely open eyes, could see the permanently bulging disfigurement of it, the crooked nail. 

A surge of anger rose from his belly as he remembered his father’s chronic angers and outbursts. The day he left that farm at age 14 to apprentice as a tailor was like winning piyango. He went to Trabzon, then Samsun, then Zonguldak, and Istanbul. How ironic it was when he had been sent back to Trabzon to do his mandatory military service. He remembered his mother, bent small, wrapped in her atkı, standing in the barrack doorway with a basket of cooked food for him. He told her to go away, that the army provided their food. Later, back in Istanbul, he signed up for a seaman’s license and that’s how he came to America, with hardly a look back. He knew he had made her cry when he left the farm and never returned. But what did he really know of her sufferings or her sacrifices? He couldn’t wait around to find out. What he did take with him was that deaf ear and busted finger and a promise to himself to never hit a child of his if he were ever to have one. 

Another thirty-degree turn and he was in his early months in America. Lonely, suspicious, yet thrilled. How hard he had worked for ten years before going back to Turkey to marry. He was so thin and had a cough that would rattle his bones and leave him speechless. At first, he thought it was just his long work hours and poor eating habits. But shortly after his return to America with his new wife, already pregnant, he had been diagnosed with tuberculosis and sent to the Nassau County Sanitarium for Tuberculosis for three months of quarantine. 

Memories of the sanitarium flooded his mind, though he tried to squash them back down. The patients whispered amongst themselves. What had the doctor said? Who was allowed for a weekend visit home? Which female patient was about to give birth? Who had left the facility one night and not returned? Would rest really cure you so you could be released? But how could he rest and recover when the front door of his tailor shop was locked, and his wife was alone in their rented apartment with no one to talk to. Even if she could speak English, which she could not, the shame of tuberculosis was unspeakable. They had not written to anyone back in Turkey to tell them or to ask for help. 

There was a tapping at the window, and he heard his name, muffled through the car door, “Michael, Michael.” 

He tilted his head up toward the voice, expecting to see a djinn floating in the dark of outer space. Was it a friendly djinn? He chanted to himself, “aç kapıyı, aç kapıyı.” Then, through the slits of his eyes, he watched his hand, as if belonging to someone else, move along the car door, finding the switch. Someone, the person saying his name, pulled on the long heavy door of the Camaro. 

“Hey Mike, are you OK? What are you doing in the car still?” 

It was Gary, the owner of the dry cleaners. He wanted to answer immediately, but first he had to collect the letters on his tongue, roll them around in his mouth for a minute till they could form a word, like a snowball in the mittened hand of a child. Finally, he opened his mouth to fling it out, “I’m sick.” 

“Oh, my goodness, you look bad, Mike. What’s wrong? Are you having a heart attack? You’re white as a sheet. I’m going to call an ambulance. Just sit here and I’ll be right back.”

The word “ambulance” jolted him into motion. “No. No ambulance. No insurance.” He paused and tried again. “Call my wife.” 

“OK, OK.” Gary said. “I’ll go call her. I’ll be right back.” 

Now he began to panic. What if Gary did call an ambulance? He hadn’t allowed himself to consider the worst. Was the source of his spinning attacks a brain tumor? Did he have cancer? Was he dying? What if he had to go to the hospital again? Was he to spend his mortgage payments on medical bills? His small retirement on an ambulance ride? His son’s college money on medication? He was only fifty years old, but how many of the men in his family were dead before fifty? His father and two of his brothers. And who could his wife turn to for help if he died today? 

He felt his heart leap up into his throat as he envisioned the stack of bills from the Nassau County Medical Center and the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary already piled high on his kitchen counter. 

Thirty degrees more and the worst of all memories elbowed its way forward. It was another seemingly ordinary day, about three years earlier. He had woken up to find that he could not see out of his right eye; later he was told it was a detached retina, (he didn’t even know the Turkish word for this thing called a retina). His first thought was to blame his parents again, although it made no sense. It was their fault that he was half-deaf (home ear-candling instead of a proper doctor), but they were both long dead and he was 9000 miles away from the farm so how could this new disaster be laid at their feet? He could not explain it, except to say to himself that there was no one else to blame. That’s what the doctors had said anyway. No one to blame. These things are random and can just happen to anyone for no reason at all. 

The day it had happened, he told his wife to go and open her shop as usual and he had driven himself to the medical center. Before he could ask about the price tag, he was rushed to surgery to reattach the retina. Later, he lay in the hospital alone, wondering how he was going to pay for it. Even though he had been told to take a few weeks of bedrest after that, he couldn’t afford to. They had just rented new premises for his wife’s dress store and there was plenty of work to be done. He had to move a heavy counter to the new shop, but pushing it up the block on a dolly had caused his newly reattached retina to explode. It took only a few days in the New York Eye and Ear infirmary in Manhattan, and thousands of dollars more in medical costs, to tell him that this time there was no question of reattaching. The damage was now permanent. 

For many weeks after that, the despair nearly defeated him, but it was only in bed at night with his wife that he could allow himself to cry. A one-eyed tailor? Who ever heard of such a thing? 

And then he became obsessed with the safety of his one good eye. The thought of total blindness made him feel like he was drowning. 

A one-eyed tailor was bad enough. A no-eyed tailor was a nothing.

But they had survived all that. So far, anyway. Just as he had learned to cup his hand around his bad ear, he learned to thread a needle with one eye. He learned to assess the English words and the American ways into a kind of half focus, tilting his face up to catch people’s voices and shifting to the right to anticipate what was coming at him through the darkness. 

He wanted so much to learn how to survive this spinning, too. 

The turning, tumbling, and cartwheeling brought him back to his mother. For his father he felt nothing. His death had been irrelevant, like the death of some faraway neighbor. But his mother was different. She had always served as both mother and father to four sons. He could see her more completely now: not just her ignorance and fears. He also saw how hard she had worked, her expertise, her strength. When she hitched up the hem of her skirt into its waistband, her sons knew it was time to hide. There was no outrunning her or the work to be done on a farm. He felt her frustrations that she couldn’t do more for him, other than show him how to haul a harvest on his back to town, just as she had been taught to do. It was as if the spinning in his head came to a screeching halt when he realized how much he was like her, that in so many ways, he was just like her. 

He wished he could see her one more time, to lean against her shoulder and shelter with her under her headscarf. He wished he could usher her into his home, to show off his children, to see his beautiful wife place a slender golden glass of tea in front of her, a small bowl of sugar cubes on the tray, too.

He felt his stomach surge again, sending shivers through his body that made him gag and squint. He tried to stay calm. He sighed with the effort, spinning in the vortex of memory, in a sky-blue Camaro, in a strip mall on Long Island. 

He heard a voice, the most precious voice he knew, calling him, it seemed, from so far away. “Mustafa, Mustafa, ne haber, iyi misin?” 

He who is giddy needs the strong loving arms of his wife. She will do everything he has been hoping for. She will bring him home, keep him quiet and still and safe until Allah flips his switch back on (or is it off)? 

But until then, tears continued to well up in both eyes of the one-eyed tailor, my father. Fat bitter tears that streaked down both cheeks evenly. 

*

Based on Mustafa’s recollections (translated from mostly Turkish, partially English) recorded 2008. He died in 2017, at the age of 87.

*

Filiz Turhan’s recently published essays have appeared in The North American Review, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Threepenny Review, Dr. T.J. Eckleburg Review and Newsday. Her book, The Other Empire: British Romantic Writings about the Ottoman Empire was published by Routledge. Forthcoming publications include several critical review essays in The Cambridge Guide to the English Novel 1660-1820. She is a professor of English at SUNY Suffolk Community College located in Eastern Long Island and a 2020 recipient of the SUNY Chancellors Award. You can read more about her at filizturhan.com.