Original subtitles

MASTER GALIP

I am sixty years old.

If only I could live for another five years.

I want to wake up, but I cannot.

Most of the time, I do not know where I am,

but sometimes I think I'm elsewhere.

I feel as if I will die if I don't wake up.

At Uskudar, in the house by the sea, I would sit up in my bed.

With a heavy heart, I would listen to the motor boats touring at night,

embarking on their journeys without beginning or end.

The sound of the engines is buzzing with nostalgia.

It calls you to some far-off place.

In front of the house at Uskudar, the Bosporus has a different voice,

a gentler and more secret one.

The spring rains fall on Istanbul. They are warm now.

In some towns, it rains non-stop for an entire month.

I should have gone to see what the world was like.

There are so many factories in Istanbul.

So many in Turkey, so many in the world.

Too many to count.

And so many men wondering, "What if I can't get any work?"

Who knows how many unemployed there are in the world?

The spring rains fall on the domes of the great mosque,

on the crowns of the minarets, on the Golden Horn, on the barges.

The spring rains fall on the fish market.

The spring rains fall on Galata Bridge.

I have never received money that wasn't a trade-off

from anyone except my grandfather on special occasions.

Passers-by don't even look at us.

Surely decent people cross this bridge, too.

Do you think we're all street peddlers in our family?

You're an aristocrat, old thing, the son of a fisherman.

A mashrabiyah wooden house.

A warm north wind fills the net curtains.

The house is silent.

A car screeches round a bend somewhere.

The streets are deserted.

It's siesta time.

Between the blackened houses, most with overhanging windows,

crawls the narrow, winding road.

Alone, such silence, such loneliness.

We go up to the first floor.

I can't get over how clean the couches are, with their linen covers.

The floor, as pure as resin from being swept, washed and polished,

is still damp.

It smells of soap, a heavenly smell of lavender and wet pinewood.

I had yet to learn that there was a job that consisted of suspecting everyone,

even without good reason.

It must be so sad to feel foreign somewhere.

It hasn't happened to me.

But at Uskudar, in the houses on the seafront,

there used to be a gardener, an Albanian,

who had lived in Istanbul for God knows how many years.

"It's a beautiful country," he would say.

"May God keep it for you, but I'm just a migrant here."

"I'm afraid of dying without seeing my homeland again."

Master Galip is famous for the strange things he thinks about.

"If only I could eat wafers every day," he thought at the age of five.

"If only I could go to school," he thought at the age of ten.

"If only I could leave my old man's cutlery shop before evening prayers,"

he thought at the age of eleven.

"If only I had yellow shoes, if only the girls would look at me,"

he thought at the age of fifteen.

"Why has my father shut up shop? The factory is different to the shop,"

he thought at the age of sixteen.

"Are they going to give me a pay rise?" He thought at the age of twenty.

"My father died at the age of fifty. Am I going to die that young, too?"

He thought when he was twenty-one.

"What if I can't get work?" He thought at the age of twenty-two.

"What if I can't get work?" He thought at the age of twenty-three.

"What if I can't get work?" He thought at the age of twenty-four.

He was often unemployed.

Until the age of fifty, he thought, "What if I can't find work?"

At the age of fifty-one, he thought, "I've grown old.

"I've lived a year longer than my father."

And now he's fifty-two years old.

He's unemployed.

Now he gets the strangest idea of all into his head.

"How old will I be when I die?

"Will I have a roof over my head when I'm dying?"