 JUSUF WAS FROM THE TOWN of Perge an hour’s walk from the Mediterranean coast of Asia Minor. Like most Turkish compatriots his age, he had gone as a young man to find work in Germany and had spent several long decades there cleaning the streets. He learned that the dogs there were called the same way that cats were lured back home in Perge. He returned to Turkey with some savings and enough German to understand the everyday conversations of the German tourists that washed over the city of Antalya, which Jusuf had made his final home.
You could say that Antalya astounded Jusuf. The city was getting younger and younger, and in it Jusuf grew older and older. The houses got newer, the streets wider, the cars sleeker, while Jusuf remained a hundred and sixty five centimeters tall and wrinkles washed over his eyes like the waves of the Mediterranean over the coast of Asia Minor. He wasn’t handsome. Unsightly and dressed in drab old clothes as he was, he looked like someone who could steal or cheat. He did not invite trust. Yet nobody thought of him that way, for as he walked the seven and a half kilometer long pebbled beach of Antalya, none of the tourists that bathed there saw him. They weren’t looking at him. Every morning he would start from the eastern side of the bay towards the West and carefully examine the pebbles in front of his feet. The sun shone down the nape of his neck, and that’s when the lighting was best for his work. Extracting his feet from the pebbles with effort, he looked carefully from left to right and from right to left. Slowly and systematically. He carried a bag and placed into it everything that had been forgotten or cast out onto the shore, yet seemed of value to him. Frequently there were lost pennies – euros from Germany, a Turkish lira (similar to the euro) here and there, and sometimes even an English pipe or cap. The things tourists forgot on the beach! Thus various objects found their way into Jusuf’s bag. A watch, a scarf, a pair of sandals… As he walked along the Antalya beach below the Hillside Su or the Sheraton hotels, since his ears weren’t as preoccupied as his eyes, he listened, or more precisely, he heard what the tourists on the beach were talking about. Most of those conversations he did not remember, just as one doesn’t remember the rustle of the waves, and only some (if they were in German) was he able to understand. But these too he forgot. Except for two. Two conversations were committed to his memory and in his mind he translated them into his native tongue.
‘Where does Turkey get all that money to build up the country so?’ asked a fat elderly German who was sprawled out beside his beer on the Mediterranean shore next to a large woman. He glanced around him and added:
‘In the last five years they’ve built around 40 hotels in this region alone as well as two airports.’
‘What do you mean where do they get the money?’ retorted the German lady, ‘Think back! The Turks have not been at war for a hundred years. Nobody alive in Turkey today can recall a single war. And war is the most expensive thing in the world.’
The second conversation was between a young married couple from Dresden. This, too, Jusuf translated into Turkish in his mind during the long sleepless stretches of winter when there was a star in the sky for each night of his life.
‘I showed you the most beautiful hotel in the world. I took you to lunch at the Adam & Eve resort in Belek. Now it’s your turn to surprise me.’
So said the young woman. The young man replied musingly:
‘I think I’ll surprise you just as you did me. I’ll show you the most precious thing in Antalya.’
‘What is it?’
‘A belly dancer.’
‘A belly dancer? You must be joking.’
‘No. I’m serious. We’ll take a streetcar downtown and ride it to the last stop, to the museum. There I’ll show you what I have to show.’
Jusuf didn’t hear the rest of the conversation. The young couple picked up their belongings and left. Jusuf memorized their words, but didn’t forget to search the pebbles they had been resting on and there he found a double-piped flute, damp, but intact. Somebody had forgotten it there, buried among the stones in the beach. He was pleased and placed the flute in his bag, but repeated the conversation in Turkish so as not to forget.
The following day he did not go to the beach. He went downtown and boarded the only streetcar in town. He paid one lira and rode to the end of the line. There he stepped off the streetcar and found himself in front of the Antalya Museum of Greek and Roman Emperors. He crossed the street and entered the lobby shyly. He had never been there before. Averting his eyes he asked the woman at the cash register if a belly dancer could be seen there. He wanted to see the most precious thing in town.
‘We sell museum tickets here; it is no such place where an Oryantal dansöz gyrates,’ the woman replied, adding that a ticket cost ten Turkish lira. Jusuf scratched his head and squeezed the bag under his arm tighter to him wondering what to do, while a watchman and the lady behind the ticket counter watched him suspiciously. He wasn’t dressed like the folk that came to the museum. Just then a second watchwoman came out from a hall and enquired what was going on as she approached. When they explained, she laughed and said to Jusuf:
‘You want to see a belly dancer?’
‘Yes!’ he retorted, confused. It seemed as though he were hiding his intentions. As though these intentions were not quite pure.
‘Come with me!’ the watchwoman said, but the ticket lady said that Jusuf hadn’t paid his ticket. Jusuf handed over ten lira and started after the watchwoman, but the watchman followed them as well displaying open distrust towards the unusual visitor.
Roman emperors chiseled of marble stood before a bench in a hall flooded with light. There was also a pedestal bearing a large female figure in a dark, flounced skirt.
‘There’s your belly dancer!’ announced the watchwoman and sat Jusuf down on the bench in front of the sculpture.
‘Where is she from?’ asked the amazed Jusuf.
‘The town of Perge,’ replied the watchwoman, ‘it’s all written on the pedestal.’
‘From my town?’
‘Yes, if that’s the town you’re from. She lived there long before you did. She isn’t Turkish, she’s Greek.’
The watchwoman had to return to her business at the museum, but the watchman remained beside Jusuf and kept a suspicious eye on the visitor. Jusuf really did look like someone who could cause trouble or damage in such a place, smelling as he did of old goat cheese and sweat. Unbearably self-conscious, Jusuf rose and fled from those unfriendly eyes that were upon him.
But Jusuf had no intention of giving up. He thought it over, and had an idea. He was going to fool that watchman.
He went to the 18th Century Tekeli Mehmet Pasa Mosque above the harbor, took a few pairs of muddy shoes that the mosque-goers had left outside, and cleaned them. When the people came out to put their shoes back on, some gave Jusuf ten kuruş, and some as much as a lira. When he collected enough, Jusuf would take the streetcar and go to the museum. Sometimes he had to buy a ticket, but sometimes they let him in without one, for of all the exhibits in the museum he went to see just the one, the most precious thing in Antalya, the twirling girl. He would sit on the bench in front of her, without his bag, which they would take from him at the entrance, and listen with straining ears to hear if any of the German visitors would read something about her from one of the books they carried with them or from the inscription under the statue. And so (whenever he could find the money) he would, under the watchful eye of the guard, slowly gather information about her.
She was much taller than he. She was two hundred and twenty five centimeters tall. She was born in the second century of the Christian era, and those who crafted her from the colored stone of Asia Minor were from Rhodes or perhaps Aphrodisias. They were Hellenistic sculptors. She had been found in the town of Perge and had a face and hands of white marble, hair, a chiton and fluttering himation of marble of a dark gray, and a black skirt chiseled from basalt. Through the centuries she wore an indescribably sad expression on her face, so that as she danced, her eyebrows clenched in a knot above her nose in announcement of tears. Tears and dancing. The tears were for her, the dancing for others.
Looking at her from the bench on which he sat Jusuf didn’t know if she was a Greek witch or the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. He knew he had to do something. Suddenly, his name stopped being Jusuf, suddenly he was no longer a hundred and sixty five centimeters tall, he wasn’t ugly, and no more did he walk through the pebbles of the coast of Asia Minor, but flew whenever he chose to. Suddenly the watchful guard looked the other way. The visitor could finally come up close to his dancer for the first time, Touch her. He was now the same height as she, around two hundred and twenty five, he was young and handsome, suddenly he understood not just her dancing but her tears as well, gathered in the folds and tied between her beautiful eyes. He did not need speech. Tears and dancing are understood without it.
And so Jusuf fulfilled his plan. From his bosom he took the flute he had found on the beach. Swiftly, swiftly, so no one would see, he put the flute to his nostrils and played an ancient tune to which dark women with direct gazes and loosened hair caravanning through his town of Perge had once swayed in his youth. Jusuf didn’t have time to see the stone statue from the museum begin to dance, awoken by the sounds of his flute, for the guards were all upon him, seizing his instrument so he wouldn’t disturb the peace of the visitors and removing him from the building. This took place one Tuesday afternoon.
Since then Jusuf was no longer permitted into the museum. But he did receive something from his belly dancer while he was playing his doublepiped flute. Her hip rising and back arching were understood by every visitor there. But Jusuf understood the arrival of her tears as well. Her secret had been revealed to him. The tears of the girl referred to something in the museum that Jusuf glimpsed from the corner of his eye in passing, in a glass case at the entrance to the hall in which he had first seen the belly dancer. It was an old jug with black pictures painted on it. The meaning of those glazed scenes explained to him her tears. Painted on the jug were bearded elderly men, naked and with very long and pointy members. Each of them had a tail from behind. Their phalluses were the sex of half-men or half-animals, intended for other males. Women who were brave enough- -or were forced-- to have sex with sileni would wither and die of it, or remain barren, or immediately conceive a child, for the tip of the member penetrated directly into the womb impregnating her… Women conceiving in such a manner would give birth to androgynous children: these children were neither angels, for they had no wings; nor human beings, for they were born without genitalia, and were unable to reproduce. Such offspring was Jusuf’s belly dancer, the most precious thing in Antalya. She could not fly, and she could not give birth. She was half-angel and half-woman...
With this knowledge of a misbegotten one and her silent weeping, Jusuf went back to the beach of Antalya carrying his bag. He no longer knew who he was, but he didn’t care. For he had learned something more about her. He walked across the gravel extracting his feet from the pebbles with difficulty, carefully looking from left to right and from right to left mindful not to miss anything lost. But what he did know, he knew forever.
*****
He knew that every Tuesday afternoon the cleaning ladies and ticket sellers at the museum usually whispered to one another:
‘The Greek witch is at it again taking her revenge because we won’t let that flutist in to play to her…’
In the entire museum on Tuesday afternoons, all the doors and windows which the cleaning ladies and watchmen knew perfectly well opened one way, could then no longer be used in the customary manner. The Greek witch turned them, and on Tuesday afternoons all the doors and windows of the museum, the entrances and exits opened in the other direction. To placate their museum witch, one evening they had to place the double flute taken from Jusuf at her feet.
Some believe, and Jusuf knows, that she sometimes places the flute in her nostrils at night, plays an aching tune and dances without once stepping down from the pedestal. | 
