Istanbul Was a Fairy Tale (24 page)

That was the evening that Muammer Bey tried to inculcate into my memory certain additional information, for the benefit of certain individuals, about things that he wanted acknowledged in relation to certain events. Among the knowledge communicated to me were nuggets of information—part of a long story narrated with words that illustrated the situation vividly—told with a wry countenance inspired by those moments as they were experienced. These words and representations would continue to impregnate certain people; ultimately joining other real life episodes in the same bed . . .

Many years went by. That small talk we had that evening, during which Eleni’s story was narrated to me, was henceforth of historical interest. After such a long time, based on my impression gained from the bits of information and clues obtained, it now and then occurs to me that there might have been an incestuous relationship between father and daughter, although it is not easy to say for certain, a relationship that cannot be defined as mere passion. Those that had preferred to stay detached from it could not possibly have formulated a judgment as they had not had any access to the said relationship at close range—a relationship that gained added meaning due to the consequences of loneliness, defeat and wrath—to arrive at a conclusion where the rainbow ended. On this arduous path I had, with some dismay, to muddle through with great difficulty. The story had a magic effect that took one away to far away places not easily definable. I felt obliged to dwell on certain details that provided new insights into the matter, in support of certain gnawing doubts. I had to decipher the meaning behind every word and expression: original, ambiguous and hidden meanings; in the expectation of having a clearer insight into what might have been experienced beyond those distant boundaries. The officer that had absconded, leaving no trace behind, might have been the hero of an imaginary story of escape concocted to keep up appearances. How else could that separation have so easily been accepted into their lives? Could there be any other plausible reason for Madame Eleni’s going about naked indoors? As far as I can remember, none of the people who would be in a position to provide satisfactory answers, from differing angles, are still alive. A mere vision, yes, a mere vision gives one a hint all the same, despite the lack of irrefutable proof and further excogitation. I owe this vision to Hüsnü who had made me a gift of it, when I had gone to that flat in search of missing links in certain stories I was imparted with, many years before, when a mass of people had shared innumerable relationships each of which was a story in itself. Men, streets, other lives lived elsewhere, there were so many obstacles that separated that time and space. Hüsnü had aged appropriately; his hair had turned gray, his cheeks had sunken and his voice trembled. He looked like a distant relative of that man that the residents of the block sent out on errands every other minute. I felt restless, and was on edge. I must say I was prey to apprehension; I was afraid of the person I had left behind. Hüsnü had smiled as though he had heard and saw that person. He had put his hand on my shoulder without even saying “good morning,” as though I had been there only yesterday. “Come, let’s have a cup of tea,” he said, “there is some fresh tea in the kettle.” A renewed acquaintance, a renewed familiarity . . . I was no stranger to such encounters: with the people we kept company with once or with those who were heading for those places, those who walked along in that long tale with us. The furniture had undergone no change; they were at their wonted places, the sole items of remembrance in that small apartment. They were the silent witnesses of tussles and separations. Hüsnü had described what he had witnessed to the extent time permitted. His younger daughter was married into a family living in Zonguldak and had given birth to two children; she had to resign herself to her fate, living on the modest sum of her husband who worked in the coal mines and was filled with fear. Her companions were now of a totally different social class. Her son had gone to Germany where he had found employment, first as a student, then as an unlicensed worker before marrying a Turkish woman of German nationality from Hamburg who was older than him, with two children, whose stabbing he had served a prison sentence for. After serving his sentence, he had been involved in illicit transactions and his name had ceased to be heard of. Everyone had gone his or her own way. Hüsnü happened to be alone for a time. His wife had forsaken him as she had deemed that it would be better for him to go back home to Erzincan after all that had passed. However, he had learned how to take care of himself. As a matter of fact, he felt, at times, quite at home in his solitude. He had no expectations; life seemed dull to him. The absence of Şükran had worn him out over time and chased him away from his healthier days. He was suffering from a sort of shrinkage that he made a point of keeping a secret. He had read of his daughter’s murder in the newspapers, like the rest of us; one morning, no different from any other morning that dawned on those streets, at a moment hardly expected either by us or by others, we were mere spectators of the incident. First he had paid a visit to the hotel, then had repaired to the mortuary; afterward, in the course of the following days he sought clues to the extent his means permitted, looking for witnesses who he thought should have seen the incident, for he believed there were witnesses hiding somewhere, witnesses he had not caught sight of or had failed to reach . . . He was seeking to open new doors to his daughter’s murder . . . to recapture the scene in which his daughter had been stolen from him . . . to embrace his daughter more tightly than ever before. To whom could he describe the despair he experienced when he had embraced his daughter’s frozen body, the heat that assailed him . . . to whom and with what words . . . with which feelings of remorse? I knew the answer to this question; as a matter of fact everybody knew. To see him was to see a specter . . . This may have been the reason why he had held his daughter’s still body in his arms so tightly, so strongly, to compensate for time lost, for all that he had lost for good, for his failures in doing so in the past, during the nights they had shared . . . He was looking to hold onto her life, yet he was grasping at it. However, barring the failures and that which was unattainable, that very moment belonged to them alone, to him and his daughter. Even though it was too late to save face, the moment belonged to him and to his daughter.

Back to our story now . . . When one broods over what has been experienced, over the cherished hopes, the betrayal, the solitude and the murder, one is inclined to conclude that, after all, they were all platitudes, and the whole thing was but the story of victims dragged toward that place, to those streets and alleys lined with huge buildings, frequented by masses of people that must belong somewhere, floodlit by those alien night lights letting visions leak out from the rooms of those who had found their sanctuaries, visions released without let or hindrance in a city which may have assumed the aspect of a monster for those that had remained in her streets, in the offing; the story of a journey in which the victim shared the same fate as his executioner, in which even the executioner was transformed into a victim. The driver had actually deceived himself when he had imposed on Şükran (to whom he was devoutly attached) that dreamworld which was never to be realized. Both were bunglers in fact, they had not properly acted that play on the stage. It seemed that they pursued a utopian dream: to be able to run a boarding house in the south, in a small town, where the sun would shower its rays upon them . . . Şükran worked as a prostitute in order to be able to collect enough funds to one day live this fairy tale . . . To collect enough funds to be able to escape, to escape far, far away . . . However, just as their dream seemed to be approaching, she realized that she had been deceived; it was a deception to which she had to resign herself in order to brace herself for what life had in store for them; like taking refuge in a lie . . . They need money in order to settle the gambling debts and to pay for the drug habits of Şükran’s lover, already a lost cause. They were fully mindful of this bare fact: yet this did not prevent them from continuing to build castles in the sky. There was no end to the number of people who wanted to take the road out of town . . . The play was destined to remain in its embryonic stages despite Şükran’s sustained efforts and perseverance. It was enacted before it was ready to be put on stage; the protagonists had, step by step, arranged for each other’s death as they journeyed toward their happy ever after. The story was, like all true love stories, a pathetic one, difficult to live with. Hüsnü had been able to see the scenes for what they were through the eyewitnesses he had contacted following his daughter’s death. What he had learned had been painful enough, but he had exercised restraint. He had simply grieved for her, for his daughter: he mourned for those who had played a part in his daughter’s story as well as for those who had abstained from doing so; he lamented his failure in being a better father to her. It was a feeling of delayed action rather than remorse. As he was wading around, remembering those difficult times in his daughter’s life, he thought that he should’ve had a part to play while the play was being enacted. In those difficult times, even though he knew full well that he could not change the hard facts of life . . . Just to hold the small hands of his daughter in his own and warm up her small feet by rubbing them during those troubled nights like in the old days . . . to be able to relive those moments . . . Most likely this had been the reason for his discontent . . . This may have been the reason why he had wanted to explain away her infamous story, by reclaiming her, consigning it to oblivion. “She was my angel, my first love,” he used to say with such pathos. “Were we to be blamed for it or for them? I don’t know. Nor can you. Anyhow, Şükran had been the ultimate victim,” he had affirmed afterward. To whom did the personal pronouns ‘we’ and ‘them’ refer? This question harps on my mind even today, after a lapse of ten years. Every time new possibilities crop up. One thing was certain though, it was a latent rebellion; but against whom? Could it be against those who had made a gift of this world to those inexperienced actors, or against those who could not afford to relinquish the world than those who desired it? Who knows? In total disregard of errors and deceptions, in spite of everything, the show had to go on. He had also said to his wife that he intended to go on living for some time yet in the den he had been occupying before going to Erzincan. He said that people’s dreams had failed to materialize in this city. “All those I came to know have left to build blocks of flats here and there. I spent what I earned for my children, for their education. To no avail! It was not fated!” This sentence reflected his disillusion. I tried to have a glimpse of the faces he concealed. These words have remained in my mind to this day because of this. Hüsnü attached great importance to education. This peculiarity distinguished him from those who had emigrated to the metropolis in pursuit of other ends, at least from those I had come to know, and had an insight into. He perused the newspapers with great voracity. This habit had earned him the nickname of
fainéant
. He was aware of this, of the wrong impression he had made on the people around him. To be aware of it was one thing, to let it bother you was another. It had never occurred to him to mend his ways to satisfy the wishes of his peers. This self-assuredness had a special appeal to me. His true efforts were somewhere else, in an indefinable spot; it seemed that a lot of effort had gone into another person, into an unidentifiable person. However, the important thing for me was the comments he made on the political developments of the day, comments that no soul could ever replicate. If one takes all this into consideration, one should visualize him as a hero of fiction. But to convince people in this respect and make it acceptable as such in their eyes was well nigh impossible. So many people had been conditioned to see others only by their social front, façade or mark that an individual assumed to depict to the world at large to indicate the role they were playing in it . . . It was not so easy to imagine that someone like Hüsnü lived by those rules. The number of people who would be willing to see him in his true light would not be many. This factor may have played a part in his loss of confidence as the years went by. The Hüsnü that I encountered years later was not the same Hüsnü, the interpreter of those strange episodes. He had abandoned his quick and ready wit at perceiving and expressing amusing points of view and of intellectually entertaining congruities and incongruities; the wit had been abandoned once and for all, buried in the places he no longer wanted to see. All that he desired now was to be able to spend the rest of his life in his village; the place that he was convinced would embrace him with all its warmth, his authentic birthplace. His native land was calling to him. The small flat where he had spent his years would accommodate other tenants. The residents of the block were being evicted as it was to be renovated and turned into a new modern building with all the amenities that such construction entailed, including central heating. The new landlords had asked him to vacate his flat. The other tenants were to follow suit. The residents vacated the premises in their own fashion, in order to make way for other apartments whose boundaries cannot be so easily defined, for other lives gaining meaning from expectations continually refurbished . . . “Well, we did live after all, didn’t we? We are being scattered now,” said Hüsnü. He thought that they had been condemned to live, that the life they led was a live history that had been sentenced to be prolonged in another part of the city. He had a store of knowledge about the residents of that block for those who cared to listen. But the Hüsnü I had seen that day appeared to have lost confidence in such people. Therefore he seemed willing to take that intelligence with him. This was his latent and effective rebellion . . . to be parsimonious, or to choose to be so, to transfer many aspects of people’s pasts to third parties . . . Thus the impression that Hüsnü gave me that day was a feeling that warranted justification . . . to keep for oneself one’s recollections and the recollections of other people. The same held true for Madame Eleni who stoically accepted her experiences like someone conscious of her position. She remembered well the fact that one had to step over to the other side of life to be a firm believer in it. She had been the person who had seen that woman for the last time. It had been almost three years. Those were the days when she went out to work every morning as the established order required, when nobody had an inkling of the disaster, thinking that everything was as it should be and about which there was not the slightest doubt. She had knocked on her door but no answer had come. As the same undertaking had been repeated three days in succession without result, she had sent for Uncle Ibrahim, the locksmith, and the door was opened. Uncle Ibrahim was a former burglar who had had vast experience in the business over many years. He had a mine of information related to the residences in question. Telling his adventures had become a part of his life. It was his custom to steal only certain things, as he was particular and selective about his choice. He specialized in silver objects. As a matter of fact, he had stolen only silverware, of which he was proud. This had to do, I believe, with some childhood reminiscences, which, as far as I know, he had told to no one and which he could not bring himself to disclose. In the end, one day, he got caught; this was a sort of abnegation as he had been his own informer—the consequence that an association with a certain candy box had made in his mind. This had persuaded him that he had to put an end to his practice; upon which he had contrived to get caught and to be convicted to many years behind bars. During his term of imprisonment he had read many books, reading whatever he could get hold of and trying to understand their contents. He had eventually concluded that what had been of towering importance to him had been merely breaking into houses just to see their contents, to contemplate the silverware rather than to pinch it. By the time he was released, he had reached his sixtieth year. Only then did he realize that not getting married or having children had been the greatest error in his life. The first thing he wanted to do was to visit the old quarter of his childhood and to see its inhabitants, the streets that had paved the way to his illegal practices. However, he could not bring himself to fit the words to the action. He thought that it would be advisable to spend the rest of his life in a different quarter of Istanbul, in a different setting. Being conscious of his hopeless obsession to break into houses, it occurred to him to practice the trade of a locksmith. He had much experience in the trade . . . That was all he had to say. “There can be no door that can challenge my skill,” claimed Uncle İbrahim. So far he had been successful in opening all the doors that people had asked him to open. As for what lay beyond the doors . . . The points that remained a mystery for the rest of us in his story had to be lived by him. That was my conviction. When I brood over what he must have felt upon breaking into houses, it seems to me that what was of particular importance to him was his experience when he was about to cross the threshold. The whole thing boiled down to a few steps . . . But these were different from normal steps. What Uncle Ibrahim told Hüsnü about what he said as he entered Madame Eleni’s premises did not surprise me. The first comment Uncle İbrahim had made was: “A deathly silence!” His comment was actually corroborated by the overpowering stench. The stark reality presented itself after a few seconds. Madame Eleni, smartly dressed, was sitting motionless in her favorite armchair in the drawing-room where she had spent her entire life; her hand was supporting her temple. In her lap was a bag that contained photographs, shiny shoes, a red dress and a heart-shaped medallion. He immediately rushed to Madame Susan. They sent for a doctor who did not delay in coming; the doctor examined Madame Eleni with the utmost diligence, like an antiquarian examining an old vase, and pronounced the cause of her death: heart attack! At first, they were at a loss as to whom the incident should be reported. Nobody knew the people she visited during the latter part of her life. She struck them as someone who was utterly alone in life, a homeless person. Homelessness was Madame Eleni’s home. When one goes over what had been experienced, home was the last thing to think of; yet daily life produces certain labels nonetheless. This was the
raison d’être
of one’s later acquaintances. By the mediation of Madame Susan, the ecclesiastical authorities were informed, who then had assumed the service of an undertaker and the charge of vacating the premises. I had already tried to tell you about such great divides. From a story dating from the deluge I well remember the sympathies and empathies expressed by neighbors at the sight of her death. The fact that she was smartly dressed on the threshold of falling into everlasting sleep is understandable under the circumstances. The difference lay, however, in that bag on her lap. It was a sign of a person who had had many years to live, of a person that had perfect confidence in an afterlife beyond the terrestrial sphere. One wonders whether certain encounters might not occur sooner or later to those of us left behind. Should one conclude then that those passions and loves remain imperishable, that they are more often than not companions to death, that, even though they are fed by lies, a time will come when they will act as clarion calls that cannot be left unanswered? How important is this anyhow? Such questions required moral courage to inquire into what had been left behind . . . the remorse one felt for one’s shortcomings when one took cognizance of the delay in having taken certain steps and refrained from making certain sacrifices. I myself had experienced such shortcomings; I had been obliged to carry with me people from places I did not want to remember. This should be the reason for our desire to reproduce certain stories in ourselves while sharing them with others. The passions we were arbitrarily obliged to give up, to abase and leave unrealized, were compensated by the figment of our imagination destined in time to be turned into a hell. At such times our lies were transformed into facts, nay, into realities.