Istanbul Was a Fairy Tale (14 page)

The apartment Schwartz inhabited was exactly like the one of his strange companion Moses. It had been a very long time since Carlo had paid a visit to the lodging in question. He preferred to sleep in his vessel. The amount of liquor he consumed kept on increasing and so he became more and more isolated. Moses kept track of him and told him aboard his vessel the error of his ways. After having remained silent for a while, he responded: “I know about passengers: Since he has come all the way here he must have had a reason.” He made clear that Schwartz could stay in that apartment as long as he wished. The apartment in question was a small lodging at Yüksek Kaldırım; a derelict place sparsely furnished, displaying many details that reminded one of the accommodation of years ago, in want of some repair and maintenance. Eva took charge of this task and made the place fit for habitation in no time as if to display her feminine merits.

My farm is my identity

Everybody felt as though it was one’s duty to look after Schwartz; he stirred in one’s mind a feeling of assurance. Now that the lodging problem had been settled, a small job was found for him to enable him to eke out a living. This was a section of the story that—although tragic—best represented this ex-captain who had inspired confidence in many a soul thanks to his knowledge of the Yiddish language. As if duty bound, he had industriously performed the tasks entrusted to him with a smile that never quit his face. One should do well to meditate over the significance of this smile. One should imagine a path that led from the streets of Vienna, littered with culture, to a harbor in the East which had been the talk of many, to its streets with flights of stairs on which couples performed indecent acts, according to some with a background of prejudices, although purer than the acts of many so-called decent people frequenting bawdyhouses, and to pastry shops where many a tale was woven, variants of quite a different tale . . . When you think of all that has been experienced, say of past experiences, this was a silent transportation of one’s exiled state that engendered one’s own island in a remote city . . . just like our readiness to pay a high cost for our choices, provided that they contained challenges, revolts for the sake of a conscious and desperate struggle. However, Schwartz, despite his loneliness, his solitude and insulation that was hardly ever experienced by other people, had been, according to Olga, successful in finding for himself a family, and had nourished a warm feeling at that table, in that house, starting from the very first evening where she had come in the company of her father to tell his story. He had come to that house almost every night as though afraid to miss a ritual . . .Soberly but smartly dressed; at times dressed in his old costumes in which he knew well how to appear
comme il faut
, and neat, up until the moment, years later, he suddenly died at home.

Olga told me that the Schwartz that she had described, despite his occasional needs, had not or could not ask for anything from anybody but lived resignedly so long as the people who had received him allowed him to stay with them. We must also take into consideration another point which might give us a clue to enable us to move forward in the development of a quite different story. Olga, in a casual conversation, had spoken about a Schwartz keenly interested in neckties. Olga had a couple of times witnessed him asking his father, or the people with who he was familiar, with bated breath to give him one of their neckties. This obsession could not easily be explained away. It may well have been an indication of his secret preservation of certain things for the scenes of that long stage play, somewhere backstage, in his depths, despite all that had been told and represented and lived. The fact was that in trying to move ahead you left certain indistinct footprints on the backs of certain people you ran across. Certain things always got lost in some people, things wanting to be mislaid. This was another mode of viewing the fact that solitude falls short of expressing certain sentiments. To my mind, Schwartz had lived with his lack of identity in this way, yes, his lack of identity . . . in such despair, because of his inability to express himself, by such a little revolt. One should, at any rate, acknowledge the fact that reticence, or words that can be carried to another dimension, to another platform of life, became more effective in the eyes of those who felt that pain, that revolt within themselves. This strange outsider had, during his entire stay in Istanbul, never abandoned his lair, his little island and was accepted as such both by his friends and by the security officers who had held a considerable sway over people during the years of World War II. This was the most melodramatic scene of the play, I should say. Whenever Schwartz, deprived of all identity, was asked to produce papers, he showed the picture of the farm he himself had meticulously drawn in distant lands. This was but a stage play, no doubt; a play in which every player continued to act out his respective role for the sake of the part he was supposed to perform, for the sake of the variety of meanings involved, in the name of delusions or unrealized dreams. My farm is my identity . . . was this not at the same time moralizing, addressed to those who did not hide themselves behind those paths of life in which meaning lay in petty calculations related to a different kind of revolt and wherein certain groupings were reverted to as masks, including among others religion, ideology or nationalism? Moral precepts that a narrow educational system could not encompass . . . If one thinks especially of the things lost or that might have been lost in the past . . . revolts or lives worthy to be narrated to some ears . . . lives gained after a turning point, despite all the losses involved. Could one have believed in this to the bitter end? An original event or the inevitable outcomes of it reminds me once more that we might be in a position to attain many different aspects of a given reality. This is at the same time an event that prevents the establishment of certain connections. What has been lived during those long years not only explains the courage of bearing the burden of that fate, but also Schwartz’s mystery of having found a place of refuge doomed to remain
terra incognita
. This guarded utterance seems to have given birth in that house to another style of expression lying in the depths, carried on by inaudible words that we are somehow conscious of. This style of expression was a dialogue that united at a given point the three individuals through their respective dilemmas, their consequential bondage and attitudes adopted toward life. The story that had brought Schwartz to Istanbul, or caused him to run against that small island within himself, seemed to have been based on an enigmatic lie, despite all its semantic content. How could anyone, like in old fictions or stage plays, be so gullible as to believe in such a whopping great lie, a lie, which, no matter how cleverly it was formed, could not escape recognition in the long run, when the actors concerned were the Bronstein family? That overstaying, that inability to depart or the reality that inevitably led to a forced coexistence seemed concealed in the few words that Moses had uttered to Olga on his deathbed. I believe that today I can interpret these words better and know how to fit them in their correct places within those lives. Eva and Schwartz had had a passionate love affair, a very deep love which had never been expressed or heightened, but experienced only by glances, fortitude and sealed lips. A love affair, between Eva and Schwartz . . . Moses also had been conscious of it. This was a sort of tacit understanding that involved afflictions known to everybody in every respect. Eva knew that Schwartz was in love with her; Schwartz knew that Eva was in love with him; both being aware of the fact that this was known to Moses. It was a love affair in which everybody had remained or seemed to have remained in his or her place, a love affair that had developed in defiance of restrictions that involved heartache, remorse and yearning for a goal totally different from its wonted aim. Under the circumstances, it was natural for Moses to remember this relationship with some gratitude and sapience years after the death of Schwartz and Eva . . .

It looked as though Schwartz had come to that house to live certain things he had not experienced before . . . Not to lose that period of his life, his time spent in that melting pot. As for Eva, vowed to her world of silence, one could read her attachment through her glances at Schwartz, as though she wanted to convey to him her tacit love by her dressy attire and delicious dishes she prepared on special occasions. She had wanted to say to him: “You know what; I actually belong to you.” I can now visualize Eva, spruced up on the occasion of the birthday of her beloved. It was a small ritual; a modest and speechless ritual one wanted to experience to one’s heart’s content. Schwartz had no idea of his actual birthdate; how could he? This also was one of the rules of the game. For the sake of his being, a new birthday had been hypothesized. It was to be the Day of Sparkles. This day was specially selected in order to celebrate it every calendar year on a different date. The day also coincided with the ritual of kindling the wicks which had, over the course of time, become the task of Schwartz . . . “I belong to you” . . . words not uttered; words that had found no expression . . . Can a love be perpetuated in this way? There will be different answers to this question, I know. Actually, the answer that we would be prepared to provide would give a clue to our view on life. Just like in the case of those three people. “I belong to you.” Even though everything may be lived or not, as one would have wished . . . In time, I came to know all sorts of other similar servitudes in the life of these people. What was decent in this tripartite relationship was that everybody had remained faithful to one another, unable to betray each other. It sometimes occurs to me to think about the fact that from the contents of the house that Eva had vacated after the death of Schwartz, she had kept only the drawing of that farm. That bronze statuette of the prancing horse had remained there as always. It wasn’t easy to forget that dream of farm life despite all that had gone on in between. The map of this evasion, of this exile must have been mislaid along with Eva herself. Yes, with Eva herself . . . In a manner suiting Schwartz, befitting those dreams sunken into oblivion . . . to the bitter end . . . Otherwise, how could we ever explain such an attachment perpetrated even after death?

I am warm for the first time

Flights, exiles, meetings . . . These may have been the key words of the story of Schwartz who had lived at Kuledibi in Istanbul, unbeknownst to many. This story of Moses and Eva experienced with great boldness comes back to me, accompanied by pictures I’ve reconstructed based on the images and hearsay imprinted on my aural and visual memories and on the inferences drawn from data available along with some probabilities bordering on absurd. There are times when I retreat to a brown study and try to attach a meaning to all that has been lived. It was not beyond probability that Schwartz left behind a family who had never forgotten him and who was still waiting for him. It might well have been that he was assumed to have fallen in action, one of the anonymous soldiers lost in the field, and that a small party had been given there to commemorate his birthday, a small ritual held in accordance with tradition, a devotional gathering, to evoke the memory of a son, of an elder brother—who knows, perhaps of a lover—based on the logical inference that he must have been killed. Interpreting it as his last story in a realm that his people could not dream of, how could they know that Schwartz was to live for another thirty years, in a totally different time frame, indifferent to the mourning of people who may have waited for him and who may already have written his obituary. This would be an apposite aftermath to Schwartz’s view of life and the world.

On the other hand, Olga, in her turn, must have, in her last days experienced a sense of absurdity. This idea was triggered in my mind by Moses’ death from pneumonia. Olga had mentioned that her father used to go out without a coat during those days, impervious to the weather. Even when it snowed, he hardly put on something to keep him warm. To those who asked him if he did not feel at all chilly, he used to answer: “Are you kidding, I’m almost perspiring!” He was a man of cold climates . . . Now that he was far removed from the winters of old, what winter, what frozen street might have affected him, one is inclined to ask. Which days and nights, what steps and glances might have been the cause of his death? The cause that made Moses perspire in the snow lay in his constitution, no doubt. Life was pregnant with funny jokes. This ailment of his was his first cold. I think that this was another indication of the fact that at times, when we feel ourselves enjoying good health, we are prone to succumb to unforeseen adversities. Why not, after all? After all, whether you wanted it to or not, a day came when you realized that you should not rely on others, even on yourself, for that matter. To fail to rely on yourself might, in truth, be interpreted as another mode of self-reliance. What is important here though is to perceive the significance of what lay in the essence of those preparations. Olga had perceived this fact and was one of the rare women who succeeded in storing this experience in some secret corner of her life. She was one of those women capable of undertaking a struggle, even a desperate struggle, at all costs. Partly because of this she had to be strong. The days during which I kept track of her behavior were an indication of this. In the wake of her father’s death she had to make certain important decisions, in order to be able to withstand the storm on the horizon. As she moved from her old apartment at Kuledibi to that small lodging at Şişli, taking with her a few belongings, she had, undoubtedly lent an ear to an internal exodus. However, how long had she felt that she existed, while she took steps toward a new Istanbul, knocking on the door of a new life? Those were the days when she had entered the life of Monsieur Jacques, determined to stay there forever. The fear she felt on those lonely nights was understandable . . . Those houses, those streets, those little expectations had all been left behind to the care of those people . . . These new rooms were waiting for a new song, the song of a different and totally new relationship. That new relationship would in turn regenerate in them new dependencies . . . That would be a relationship calling for patience and self-sacrifice more closed to the established rules of morality. Had Olga perceived this? Could she have perceived it? And, what was even more important, had she been willing to do so? We had to be content with what our own answers and powers of imagination provided us with, in order that we might arrive at certain bare facts. According to the accounts of Olga, there must have been also certain events, certain words mislaid altogether, introspections, contingencies and cherished feelings within the confined space of a single room. Olga had mentioned it. In her new abode, she had to endure those long nights by reading and re-reading the books she had already read; she had also mused, not only upon her father, whom she had set eyes upon quite late in life, but also upon Henry, with whom she had shared a streaming movement toward an unknown future, and upon her elder brother whom she had never seen but who wrote about a utopian distant realm. All these were for the attention of certain people, the intention being to be able to convey all these intricacies to them. Yet, she knew well that that was impossible, simply impossible. There was no denying that those had been her men, her days; the men that she kept at arm’s length from her and from each other. That obstacle that denoted a blind alley, difficult to define, demanding courage, made itself felt after a certain point, perhaps just because of this. One was in pursuit of conceiving that short byway faced with the dilemma between telling or not telling, a two-way road, a vacillation, a time of unrest that provided clues for a worldview. All this was certainly not due to despair but to self-protection and self-preservation; it was due rather to a concern about the failure to recollect words and imagery, to find in others the echo they deserved. This must have been the reason why she had confidentially kept that diary for herself, not allowing anyone to have access to it or to those letters. The texts in question were written in French. There was nothing to wonder about. French was her language of liberation; her language of hope, if one recalls the days she had spent at the French college
Notre Dame de Sion
. As a young girl the nuns had considered her likely to push the limits of a glorious life. This was the source of her self-reliance and self-consciousness, a reason for having confidence in herself and never losing hope. Do we not need to take refuge in certain successes in life although they might not bear any significance for others? Perhaps. What we should particularly dwell upon now are not the answers we can provide to this question. What we experience and are obliged to experience invites us to different places anyway, and may, in the long run, cause us to be tempted by the attraction of different people or sentiments. What concerns me particularly, what confronts us with a vacuity and what arouses in us the sense of our having missed an opportunity is the likelihood of her destroying all that she has written so far. Inconceivable! The Olga I knew attached value to her past experiences and loved to relive those moments of her past. With reference to that night of destruction, it was quite interesting to hear her say: “As I was committing them to the flames in the stove, I felt as though I was burning myself. But I felt warm for the first time in years.” I never forgot those words. I made several comments on them. Why had she acted in this way? It occurs to me to think of certain events, and consequently, to imagine a story with many variants; one of which may be the following: during Henry’s last days at the old people’s house, he may have asked her to bury everything that connoted their cohabitation somewhere nobody would ever discover. This wish may have arisen because of a desire, while quitting this world, to leave behind as few things, as few ‘graves,’ as possible, to convey at least to a human being near him a deception caused by defeats and disappointments experienced in this world. The fantasy of obliterating all the imprints that one left before one departs for another world . . . to depart without leaving a trace . . . even though one is believed to survive in the imaginations and minds of certain individuals. This was not a situation that one could witness every other day. One might surmise that everybody might, after all, prefer, though tacitly perhaps, to leave an imprint, however insignificant, before one departs. One should also take stock of the fact that the deception to which Henry had been subject was not of the sort one would chance to meet every day. He had experienced a deception and he had nourished despair at a great cost; he must have thought that he did not deserve such abandonment after having led such a life with those individuals. Anyway, the cost had been paid in full. The reprisals were taken for those victories and successes. But Olga was a woman who knew how to live life to the bitter end, and who proved this through action. She had seen what she wanted to see. Nobody had seen what everybody would have liked to see . . . the
auto da fé
in which all the notes had been incinerated. It was an unfortunate fact that a whole lot of details had thus been barred from our sight. Words, details, secret representations and betrayals had been saved by not being confined within the boundaries of a given text. They had vanished and been simply mislaid; for a life for two, for which a meaning was sought despite the views of others. This must have been the defense mechanism of Henry’s story. Here was a person, who had, before taking up his abode in a different life that he detested, left behind years spent in a totally different existence. Our visualizing that story properly, as outsiders, was according to them, not within the realm of possibility.