The Hearsay Tense

by Edward Sapir, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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The complainant smelled of the beam-house, and the smell came into the courtroom ahead of him. It was a February morning in 1923, eleven degrees on the thermometer outside the clerk's window, and the radiators of the district court on Lowell Street knocked like men who wanted to be let in. The smell was lime and old flesh and the sweet, heavy note of tan-bark. The policemen on the benches knew it and did not turn round. Peabody had lived with that smell for a hundred years and called it money.

Solomon Behar had come out from Boston on the eight-ten from North Station, with his good collar in an envelope in his pocket so that the soot would not get at it. He put it on in the corridor. The clerk, a thin man named Purinton who kept his pencils in a cigar box, took his name, his address on Salem Street in the North End, and the languages he swore to: Turkish, Greek, Judeo-Spanish, French. Purinton wrote Turkish and stopped.

"That's all we want today. Three dollars, paid at the close."

"And the car fare?"

"Three dollars," said Purinton, "paid at the close."

The case was larceny of a pay envelope. Commonwealth against Osman, no other name, a currier at the Pratt & Gould tannery, twenty-six years of age, of no fixed address in the Commonwealth beyond a boarding house on Walnut Street, the street the newspapers had taken to calling Ottoman Street. The complainant was Rıza, also of no other name, a beam-house hand at the same works, thirty-one, of the same boarding house. The envelope had held twenty-three dollars and forty cents, a week's pay with an hour's overtime. It had been under Rıza's pillow, and then it had not.

There was no counsel. A police sergeant named Garvey prosecuted, as police sergeants did in that court, standing at the end of the table with his cap beside his elbow like a third party to the case. Judge Tarbox sat above them all under a portrait of a Tarbox who had sat there before him. He wore no robe. He had a cold, and a folded handkerchief on the bench, and every so often he looked at it as if it had been entered as an exhibit.

Behar was sworn first, to interpret truly and well. Then Rıza was sworn, and there was a short delay over that, which Behar resolved by asking him in Turkish whether he would swear by God, and Rıza said that he would, and Judge Tarbox said that God would serve. Rıza stood with his cap in both hands. He was a broad man with a scar across the back of one hand, white and shiny, where a hide had been dragged across it wet. His Turkish was the Turkish of the far east of Anatolia, slow and wide in the vowels, the speech of the Harput villages. Behar had grown up in Izmir, on the other side of the same country, and to his ear the man sang a little, as a Boston ear hears a Maine farmer sing.

"Ask him," said Sergeant Garvey, "what happened to his money."

Behar asked. Rıza told it plainly. On Friday he was paid. He came home to the house on Walnut Street. He put the envelope under the pillow, as he always did, because the men who slept in the bed by day were at the works then and the room was empty. He went down to the coffee house for an hour. When he came back the envelope was where he had put it, but it was flat.

"Boştu," said Rıza. It was empty.

Behar gave it in English, sentence by sentence. The sergeant nodded. Purinton wrote. The judge looked at his handkerchief.

"And who took it?"

Rıza did not hesitate. "Osman almış."

"Osman took it," said Behar.

He heard himself say it, in the clean flat English of the North End night school, and the sound went out across the room and was received. The sergeant nodded again. Osman, on the bench by the rail between two policemen, did not need it translated; he had understood the Turkish, and he made a small movement with his head, not a denial, more like a man brushing off a fly.

Behar stood still for a moment. It was not a thing he had thought; it was a thing he had heard. There is a difference, in Turkish, between aldı and almış, and no one who learned Turkish at his mother's knee fails to hear it as plainly as he hears the difference between a door opening and a door shutting. Aldı: he took it, and I was there, and I saw. Almış: he took it, so it seems, so I gather, so they tell me; I was not there. The verb will not let a speaker leave it out. Every story told in the past in that language must declare, in its last syllable, whether the teller saw.

Rıza had said almış. And Behar had carried the words across into English, and the syllable had fallen off on the way like a parcel off a cart, and nobody in the room but the two Turks knew that anything had been dropped.

"Your Honour," he said. "I must correct my interpretation."

Judge Tarbox looked up from the handkerchief. "Correct it how?"

"He said that Osman took it. But in Turkish there are two ways to say took, sir, and he used the second. It is the form you use when you did not see the thing happen. When you know it some other way."

"So he's guessing," said Sergeant Garvey.

"No, sir." Behar found he had raised his voice a little, and lowered it. "He is telling you how he knows. In his language he has to. If he had seen it, he would have had to say so, and he would have used the other form. He did not use it."

There was a short silence in which the radiators knocked. The judge put his handkerchief to his nose, considered the sergeant over the top of it, and put it down.

"I have been on this bench nineteen years," he said, "and I have heard a good many men tell me who took what. I don't believe I have ever heard one who was obliged by his grammar to tell me whether he was there." He sniffed. "Ask him, Mr. Behar. Did he see Osman take the envelope?"

Behar asked. Sen gördün mü? Kendi gözünle? Did you see? With your own eyes?

Rıza looked at him as if he had been asked whether he had seen the moon fall into Walnut Street. "Görmedim," he said. I did not see. Then, quickly, in the anxious way of a man who feels the matter sliding: "Ama almış. Herkes biliyor."

"He did not see," said Behar. "But he says, again in the second form, that Osman took it. And he says that everybody knows."

"Everybody," said Judge Tarbox, "is not a witness in this court. Very well. Then let him tell us what he did see. In the other tense."

---

So they went over it again, and this time Behar asked each question so that it could be answered only with what the man had seen, and Rıza, who was not a stupid man, understood what was wanted and answered in the hard past, the witnessing past, each sentence ending in its little shut door.

He had put the envelope under the pillow. Koydum. He had gone to the coffee house. Gittim. He had come back after an hour, perhaps a little more. Döndüm. The envelope was there and it was empty. Boştu. He had gone down to the kitchen and asked the woman of the house, Mrs. Foley, who had been in the kitchen all afternoon. She said she had seen Osman on the stairs. That part he gave in the second form again, görmüş, and Behar gave it as "she says she saw," and the judge nodded as at a man who had learned a trick of the cards.

"Is the woman here?"

She was not. She had the house to keep and nine men's dinners to cook, and nobody had told her she was wanted.

What else had he seen? On Sunday, two days after, Osman had come down to the coffee house in a new overcoat. Rıza had seen it with his own eyes; he said so without being asked. It was a dark blue coat, a heavy one, with a velvet collar, from a shop in Salem. Rıza had seen the shop's name on the paper it was wrapped in. Gördüm. Osman had not had a new coat before. Osman had worn the same coat since the summer before last, a brown one with the lining out at the left pocket. Rıza had seen that too, every day, at the works and on the stairs and at the table.

"How much was the coat?"

Rıza did not know. He gave a figure in the second form, eighteen dollars, and Behar rendered it "eighteen dollars, he has heard," and the sergeant, with something of the air of a man watching his case being taken apart by a stranger with a screwdriver, said, "Heard from who?"

"From Osman," said Rıza, when it was put to him. "Osman told everyone."

Then they swore Osman.

He was younger than the complainant, narrow, clean-shaven, with long hands that had been yellowed to the wrists by the vats. He wore the blue coat. He had evidently thought about whether to wear it, and decided that a man who has nothing to hide does not leave his coat at home. The velvet of the collar had already gone flat at the back where it rubbed on his neck.

He said that he had not taken the money. Ben almadım. He said it in the first form, the form of the thing a man knows because it is his own life: he had not taken it, and he was the one who would know. He said that he had won the money for the coat at the coffee house on the Thursday night, at cards, from a man from Hüseynik who had since gone to work in Lynn. He named the man. He named the game. Behar, who did not know the game, asked him to name it again and wrote it down in his notebook in his own way, the Latin letters with the Turkish values, because there was no English word for it and he did not intend to make one up in a courtroom.

"Was anyone else present when he won this money?"

Osman named three men and the keeper of the coffee house, a man called Hacı Nuri.

"Are any of them here?"

None of them were here. It was a Monday; the works did not stop because Osman had been arrested.

Judge Tarbox put his fingertips together. Sergeant Garvey looked at his cap. On the bench by the rail, the two policemen looked at the blue coat, as though they could take its price by eye.

"I am not going to find this man guilty," said the judge, "on the evidence of a coat and an empty envelope and what everybody knows. I'm not going to discharge him either, with a woman on Walnut Street who says she saw him on the stairs and four men at a card table who aren't here to say anything. The case is continued to Monday next. Sergeant, you'll have Mrs. Foley here, and the coffee house man. Mr. Behar, we'll want you again. The defendant is released on his own recognizance, and I'll ask the interpreter to make clear to him that if he goes to Lynn, or to anywhere else, he will find the Commonwealth has a long arm and a short temper."

Behar made it clear. He put it more gently than the judge had, because Turkish takes threats more seriously than English does and there was no need to frighten the man. Osman listened, nodded, and said, "Tamam." All right. The policemen stood aside to let him go, and he went out through the swing door without looking at Rıza, holding his velvet collar up round his ears against the corridor's draught.

Purinton paid Behar three dollars in silver at the clerk's window and had him sign for it in a ledger. Behar asked again about the car fare. Purinton looked at him with the expression of a man whose patience is being tested beyond its usual length.

"Next Monday," he said, "you'll get another three."

---

Rıza was waiting on the steps. He had put his cap back on and had pulled it low, and in the cold his breath went up past the brim. When Behar came out he fell into step beside him without asking, as if they had arranged it, and they went down Lowell Street together toward the square in silence. The ground was black ice in the gutters. A coal wagon went by with its horse in a blanket.

At the corner Rıza said, "Kahve?"

Behar looked at his watch. There was a train at one. It was a quarter to twelve.

"Kahve," he said.

The coffee house on Walnut Street was a front room with the parlour furniture taken out and eight small tables put in, and a stove at the back with a copper pot on it, and a window steamed so thick that the street was a grey rumour beyond it. There were men at four of the tables, men off the night shift with their sleeves still damp, and at two of them men were playing cards. They looked up when Rıza came in, and then they looked at Behar and at his good collar and went back to their cards. Behind the stove a stout man in a sheepskin waistcoat was grinding coffee in a brass mill as long as a forearm.

"Nuri Efendi," said Rıza, and the stout man lifted his chin.

So that was Hacı Nuri, who had been present on Thursday night, or had not, and who would be asked about it next Monday by a judge with a cold. Behar looked at him with interest. Nuri looked back with no interest at all and went on grinding.

They sat at the table by the window. The coffee came in small cups without handles, thick and sweet, with the grounds settled at the bottom like silt in a harbour, and Behar held the cup in both hands for the warmth before he drank. He had not drunk coffee made this way since he left Izmir, in the spring of 1913, at nineteen. In the North End the coffee was Italian and came in large cups and you could see the bottom of it.

Rıza drank his in two swallows and set the cup upside down on its saucer, an old habit, for the grounds to be read. He did not read them.

"You speak well," he said. "Not like us. Like a city man."

"I'm from Izmir."

"İzmir." Rıza said it the eastern way, with the vowels pulled long. He looked at Behar with something new in his face, the look of a man who has heard a piece of news in the paper and finds himself, unexpectedly, at a table with it. "İzmir yandı," he said.

Izmir burned. The first form. The hard past. The past you have seen.

Rıza had not seen it. Behar knew that as surely as he knew the man's village; Rıza had been carrying wet hides from the beam-house to the vats at Pratt & Gould's in September, as he had been every September for ten years. But all of Walnut Street had heard it from the Greeks at the works and in this room, and it had been said over these tables so many times, by so many men, that it had stopped being a thing anyone was told and become a thing everyone knew, like the date of a holiday. It had gone into the first form the way news goes into history. Behar had heard it said that way twenty times since the autumn, by Greeks in the North End and Armenians on Shawmut Avenue and once by a Jewish tailor from Salonika, in Spanish, with no tense in his language to choose between.

And he had heard himself, twenty times, give the answer he gave now.

"Yanmış," he said.

It burned, so they tell me.

He had a letter in his inside pocket, from his sister Rebeka, written in October and arriving in December, eleven pages in the Hebrew letters of their Spanish, with the corners worn soft from being taken out. The house in the Jewish quarter was standing; the fire had not come there. The shop on the Frank Street, where their father had sold French buttons and English thread for thirty-four years, was not standing. Nothing on the Frank Street was standing. Rebeka had gone down to see, on the fourth day, when the soldiers let people through; and she had written it all, what she saw, the iron shutters melted to the sills, the street so full of ash that you could not tell where the pavement had been, and the smell, which she said she could not describe and then described for a page. She had seen it. She had written it in the language of their kitchen, which does not ask. And when Behar read it, sitting on his bed on Salem Street with the radiator off to save the coal, it came to him in the other tense: he had not been there. He had been on Salem Street.

Rıza looked at him for a while. The card players slapped a trick down at the next table, and one of them laughed. Nuri Efendi had stopped grinding and was wiping the brass mill with a cloth, slowly, looking at nothing.

Then Rıza nodded, the slow nod of a man who has been told something and has decided to take it as it is given.

"Yanmış," he said, more quietly.

He turned his cup the right way up, looked into it at the black silt of the grounds, and set it back down on the saucer, and reached into his coat for the coins to pay for both.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (17 October 2026), ab Eduardō Sapir per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Edward Sapir, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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