Read Istanbul Was a Fairy Tale Online
Authors: Mario Levi
Istanbul Was a Fairy Tale (3 page)
İncila Hanım
Her teachers at the conservatory had seen in her a prospective Seyyan Hanım. However, she had taken risks by opting for solitude and deception, by marrying Hugo Friedman and getting lost in London. She regularly returned to her seaside residence at Kanlıca every year for the sake of the old clutter left behind; thus she remained tied to her past as she sipped her raki while watching the sea of the Bosporus.
Monsieur Robert
In his small hotel room at Sıraselviler, where he had ventured to return, were the photographs of a man of failure, of a man who left behind him a long past during which he had lived so many other lives. It had not been so easy for him to accept the fact that his actual home had been the small apartment of İncila Hanım in London. Neither could he forget the night when he had lit the cigarette of Princess Soreyya in that vast saloon in Monte Carlo. Whether he was alive or dead during the days when the present story is narrated is a mystery.
Monsieur Tahar
He was stylishly dressed and carried a cane; the dark spectacles he wore when he went out gave him the air of an old spy condemned to live in a given city rather than of a retired journalist. He believed that mysticism was a long poem, a gift to humanity, not fully understood yet. Had they known the experiences he had had in Casablanca during his adolescence and youth, his friends in old age would have understood him better.
Monsieur Aldo
A Catholic Arab born in Beirut; a Levantine from İzmir; a resident of Thessalonika; an Istanbul Jew called Ashkenazi; all four of his identities. Some claimed that he had spent his last years in Barcelona, some in Goa. Some asserted that he had died of syphilis, while others believed that a Syrian arms dealer had stabbed him. All these were his multifarious identities and lives. Actually, he was a notorious swindler. It was said that he had connections the world over.
Lola
Thanks to her studies in music and dramatic arts in Budapest, she had been a colorful figure on the stage in Soho. She had had to pay a high price to escape from the gas chambers. Had her encounter one evening with Monsieur Robert really changed the course of her life?
Carlo
He boasted of having mastered thirteen languages in addition to Yiddish. He was a staunch believer that true love could only happen at sea. The fact that he ended up being a pilot duly qualified and licensed to navigate a ship into and out of the special waters on the Bosporus may have had its roots in this conviction. However, when he decided to remain betrothed to the sea, he had intended to persuade himself that he actually was expecting somebody, and would be waiting for that person till the bitter end.
Şükran
In her small, gloomy, and stinking apartment, she kept dreaming that one day she was sure to be heading for a sunnier aspect. Her story might be inserted in a daily paper as an ordinary incident.
Hüsnü
His failure to feel himself as adapted to Istanbul was due to his obsessive clinging to ‘outlandish value judgments.’ The reason for his despair, for his inability to embrace his daughter at difficult times, may have had its origin in his estrangement from the bright lights of the city. One should not forget that Bafra cigarettes never quit his fingers and that he diligently kept that newspaper till the end of his days. Going back to his hometown without having acquired a flat in the city must have played a part in this.
Anita
There was a step she wanted to speak about to her narrator. The moments they met had not been coincidental; it was a necessary consequence of the story’s plot. But in order that that step might be taken forward one should believe that other flowers had also sprouted on the skirts of the mountain.
Eleni
She had not deserved to be cooped up in that house. She had reacted to this by wandering stark naked in the rooms in which she was penned up. It was rumored that a daredevil army officer had wooed her in her younger years. Pinpointing that officer might have completely changed the course of the story.
Tanaş
The taste of the sandwiches he made in his delicatessen at Perşembe Pazarı must have indelibly remained on the palates of gourmands. He was believed to have been attached to his daughter by a secret passion.
Jerry
He was believed to have drawn the entire plan of a huge rocket. When he had gone to study at Harvard University, a rumor was spread that he belonged to a secret society. At the time of penning the present story, his whereabouts are still a mystery.
Marcellina
According to some she was a real woman; while others thought that she was but a virtual image. You could run into her anywhere in the world at the least expected moment.
Harun
The compelling reason for his abandonment of guitar playing and the resignation of his managerial position in a big company in order to launch into the business of gastronomy by producing meatballs was never explained. Although he was one of the principal actors in the story, he preferred to remain always in the background.
Joseph
He had never been able to tell anyone the identity of the individual he had been looking for in that ‘vast white land.’ As he was returning from the island riding a phaeton toward the lights of the city, one wonders if he had finally understood that everything fitted together after all.
Niko
He claimed that he had a paramour in Thessalonika waiting for him like Penelope. If he hadn’t been such a skillful tailor, everybody would have called him a vest thief. When he was deported on that ominous day of exile from Istanbul, he had entrusted the gramophone records bearing the brand His Master’s Voice—dating from the epoch of Monsieur Schurr and the Geserian Brothers—to a close acquaintance, in the hope of returning to the city one day to recover them. However, the said collection vanished into thin air, the identity of the acquaintance in question remains unknown.
Yorgo
Yorgo was Niko’s cat. It was claimed that it understood Greek and drank raki.
Aunt Tilda
She had been only partially successful in seeing movie stars embodied as real people. When she had had the honor to be invited to that wedding party, she firmly believed that she had made herself as handsome as Merle Oberon. Nevertheless, she had surreptitiously crossed that boundary. Both in her marriage and in all her illicit relations, she bore the traits of that long walk.
Moses
Tradition had compelled him not only to become a tailor, but also to live in a succession of cities. That watchmaker from Odessa had transmitted to him a tale he would carry with him in the years to come, and, what is more important, he retransmitted it to other people as well. The fact that he caught pneumonia in Istanbul, his last refuge, was absurd.
Henry Weizmann
He was a Spanish-Jewish communist who had taken refuge in France in the wake of the Civil War. Had he not sent ‘that letter’ to Monsieur Jacques, he would not have appeared in the present story. He had been to Istanbul on two occasions. His second visit must have been, in all probability, for the sake of having a role in the story’s other moments that were left untold.
Rachael
She waited everywhere for Nesim, whom she loved, lived for, and whom she tried to understand. Her contemplation of life with a smile on her lips was not merely an expression of her personality. She felt a deep remorse for having forsaken her autistic brother who had lost his hold on reality, but she knew well enough that she could not tear herself from her family who was settled in another land. All these things took place before the concentration camps. Had a belief in Job’s legacy had its adherents even then?
Muammer Bey
His bow tie was an integral part of his neck. His conviction that work was an impediment to living had obsessed him throughout his life. He was to assume an important role in the days of the capital tax, a role that may well have been overlooked by many.
Madame Perla
Being deprived of her sight, she had seen places no one else had ever seen and touched spots no one else had ever touched. She had never forgiven her husband for having died without giving her notice. In her later years, her son preferred to conjure up her beautiful former image, which he presented whenever they were back from Şehzadebaşı. They had a ca
ï
que of their own in which they boarded and cruised about the Golden horn.
Avram
He had been a connoisseur of the good things in life as well as a perfectionist in his profession; he meticulously mended old carpets, making them new. The days in which he and Moses (a hero of an ancient tale) were avidly waiting to see the winning numbers of the national lottery at the café Sarı Adam had been long after the conflagration. The phobia of dropping dead one day in the street may perhaps be connected with the impression that the blaze had left in him.
Mimico
He had tried to capture a whole world, the whole gamut of luminescence in his marbles. Had he been able to tour the island on his bike, a great many of his friends would have looked at him in a different light. The dishes he consumed at that restaurant in Tepebaşı may have been, for this simple reason, his most tangible meals.
Lena
She seemed to have come from a movie. She smoked with a long cigarette-holder and said that life started after midnight.
Nesim
His sincere admiration for the German language had not prevented him from being sent to the concentration camps. If one takes into consideration certain incidents from his life, one may say that he was a real Ottoman gentleman who had never broken his attachment to Istanbul. In that small city on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean, he had persuaded himself that he could be rescued from that cold road to death by taking refuge in his Turkish nationality. However, the heroes of the time were obliged more than ever to take certain particulars into consideration.
Monsieur Jacques
He was a man of contrasts who nurtured in his mind certain perceptions of mortality, as seen by different individuals. Without him, this long story could never have been penned. In his letters from Spain addressed to his parents, he proved to be a person well versed in the niceties of life. Tales, as much as beach combing in his later years, were of great importance to him. He was a skillful player of bezique. He had a special fascination with roses. All of these matters might be sufficient in describing his feelings at the seaside restaurant at Kireçburnu as he sat watching the sea traffic on the Bosporus.
TALES AND RECOLLECTIONS
Estreya’s star
As the years went by, one learned how to carry, in different guises, the burden of sorrow caused by the inevitable acts of forsaking and being forsaken. In time, one discovered the charm of hiding oneself behind a façade. Upon reaching a certain stage, there came a moment in one’s life when one felt like disclosing, even to one’s inner voice at an irreversible moment of loneliness, what one was leaving behind and where . . . even though one might feel exposed and vulnerable despite all of one’s proliferations—a feeling of nakedness despite one’s rich attire. Anyway, one had to believe in the existence of a clear path in order to be able to go on living—in a certain time and space—where one’s loneliness could not possibly define, in light of the facts, the influence of other people on one’s journey. To express it with a string of empty platitudes in the current jargon can be constrictive because the others were there. The others . . . just like those found in traditional tales . . . in different places, in different climates, at diverse latitudes of sensations, in cities where one could never live as long as one lived in one’s imagination . . . The others would be there; even though one moved away and settled elsewhere; even though they were lost to sight, they would still be visible; even though one left for somewhere else, set out for other regions of the earth carrying along one’s boundaries within, they would not relinquish their grip. The play put on the stage was your play in fact, the stage for which everybody got prepared in their respective changing rooms; the changing rooms, wherein they feared intrusion into their privacy and mirrors, and were more often than not ignored; it was a play enacted by the spectators along with the players, as they could not possibly absent themselves from it. Preparations were always made by someone for someone else, for days properly generated, for nights properly reproduced through the stage, or more precisely, for nights saved.
For the weekends one spends and shares with others through short incursions to the countryside, with short sallies in measured steps . . . through a tacit understanding known to everybody that nobody dares to question by raising his voice.
In all probability, that was how it had always been in the past. After all, nothing had changed in the real sense of the word; was it ever possible? You might ponder upon victories, defeats, disappointments, remorse, and separations that would eternally come back to you through all channels. Nevertheless, in order to have a clearer picture of the longing of Monsieur Jacques (more for Olga than for anybody else) not only should one experience all these eventualities, but one should also know how to attain the height of patience required in the telling of a convoluted tale by putting up a spirited defense against the influences of retroactive experiences and future prospects and justifications.
Attaining such heights in daring to advance toward certain people, even through cautious steps . . . gingerly, to wit somewhat unmanly . . . it was not possible for me, in my capacity as a visitor who had had access up to a certain extent to those lives in my capacity as a stage actor, to guess, during those interminable nights, who exactly was or had been associated with which particular apparition, scent, or sound, and to collate the fragments into a whole in the most perfect manner to their great satisfaction, so long as those individuals lived. It had also been my desire to descend into those labyrinths. Man watches man, but yet is an obstacle despite all his attempts at understanding him. There were also certain visions and feelings that occupied other regions in people’s lives. In time, I was to have an insight into the importance of these regions once I learned how to keep up with them, despite my occasional escapades. What remained to be done, under the circumstances, was to know how to unearth clues, how to discover them and how to live the stories concealed behind appearances, in unidentifiable corners, by trying to live them, or at least, by making as though one had lived them, and, by daring to go on as though one was in pursuit of an elusive image. That was the only way to go beyond a stage play meant to be enacted for other people with scenes performed or represented through dialogue. I believe I have already mentioned the magic of certain outcomes one encounters in other tales as well.
We had come together for the last time at Juliet’s house to commemorate Madame Estreya, who had lived elsewhere, in a different fashion, in compliance with the requirements of the path that had led her there. She died surrounded by other people, despite having reserved her last moments for herself, for herself alone. Nobody had considered her death as an ordinary death; nobody would be left cold in her absence in the proper sense of the word. Following the funeral, we had, as tradition required, come together for a repast, the procedure of which never changed, and which all the family members were supposed to attend. This was the last duty to be performed. Nobody could usurp this experience from anyone. Nobody . . . Not even life itself . . . Not even the lives that seemed a betrayal to certain people. This togetherness was at least an opportunity to experience anew those private moments we keep inside ourselves without disclosing them to others, trying to fit them into a shorter bracket of time. During the said repast, just like in all such cases, partly because of this very fact, we were face-to-face with our recollections, petty remorse, and the memory of the deceased. Although the lives were not always our own lives, the dead were our dead. This was clear enough even during the last prayer recited to commemorate them. One should bow with respect in the presence of the family members considered, or rather believed, to have ascended to heaven. The rabbi took a roll call of the departed while the congregation chanted in unison “They are in Heaven.” This was how it had been and was desired to have been over the centuries . . . At that moment the features of those deceased came from your own images, the truth which you could not always disclose just to any chance newcomer. It goes without saying that you could return to the past by recalling the people you had left behind at different times and places; you could realize this return without letting your surroundings get a hold of you, despite having seen and lived those locations. These curtailments were your own, while the stage play was being addressed to the people at large.
The funeral was conducted in a small synagogue at the cemetery. Madame Estreya had neither a large enough assembly to fill a big synagogue, nor enough money to warrant a first class funeral service. I remember her image vanishing in the din of the distant past. However, the image now looks tarnished with certain details blotted. This is the reason why I cannot communicate the legacy she must have entrusted to certain individuals whom I have not met. It seems that certain things have sunk into oblivion for good and are irretrievably lost. All the paths that had led up to her have closed, as they were meant to be. She had always been an outsider; an outsider among outsiders, condemned, if one may be allowed to qualify her as such, or maybe as someone who had chosen to be an outsider after a certain point. An outsider . . . Yet, Madame Estreya was Madame Roza’s sister, the second daughter of her family, who had preferred a thorny way of life at a heavy cost, who always wanted to be considered aloof, at a distance, although not so much a castaway as Aunt Tilda. Despite the beauties of their traditions and their conservative character, there were so many cruelties that had accompanied them, so many archaic failures. Their tale was meant for those who could remain content with very few incidents as far as plot was concerned, for those who would deem that a few sentences would be more than adequate, and for those who would prefer to remain faithful to their traditions. The tale should be an ordinary tale, not deserving to be a topic of serious discussion or to be elaborated upon, rendering it totally unrecognizable.
To the best of my judgment, Madame Estreya was the most beautiful girl belonging to the family; she had deep blue eyes, possibly inherited from a distant Thracian relative. During her high school years, she had been an introverted music lover. The high school they had enrolled her in was a distinguished establishment where young girls were brought up as ladies. At the time she had taken a fancy to Dickens and had identified her brother, Monsieur Robert, with the heroes in Dickens’ novels, which she read over and over again. When she was still a student at the
Galatasaray Lycée
, she had fallen in love with a young man who was also a student there. A happy coincidence must have arranged her meeting with this sensitive young man who was to figure prominently in her life, his name was Muhittin Bey. An individual who liked music, making no distinction between the songs of Salahattin Pınar and Chopin’s
Polonaises
, both of which he used to listen to in rapture, and who preferred to keep his love for poetry as a secret he disclosed only to a few of his companions. What had the circumstances that had led to their fatal encounter been? I have never been able to discover; nor shall I ever be able to do so henceforth. It seemed as though there was a kind of gap between themselves and others. This was one of the reasons that brought reticence, a tabooed subject never to be referred to. However, as far as I can gather, it was one of those overwhelming love stories, an ineluctable love that had to be eventually sanctioned despite all hostile reactions and barriers, in which the parties involved vowed to each other to share their lives for better or for worse, resigning themselves to all the consequences, and, according to others, the parties involved, as castaways, were determined to lead each other toward each other’s unhappiness. It looked as if they had vowed allegiance to each other with full knowledge of the fact that the whole thing was going to end up in an interminable brawl. Their domicile had been in Feriköy for a time. Then they had moved to Harem, a locality alien to them and completely removed from their families, as if they wanted to give their banishment an official identity. Harem was, at the time, a district removed from the commotion of society, where a Jew would never think of residing. As far as I know, this had been Estreya’s idea. This was a choice that could be made perhaps but once in one’s lifetime with a view to determining one’s place in the world, in full anticipation of a bright future. For a bright future, yes, but at the same time, to impart on certain people the cry of revolt, the servitude of love, the call of a true love and the determination not to turn back, by having their bridges burned once and for all; to be able to stick to one’s determination to continue on this one-way journey by taking into consideration all untoward events looming ahead, wrapped in sentiments of abandonment and the call of self-affirmation. Apparently, this change of domicile had not been easy for Muhittin Bey, as he had always considered himself part and parcel of the ‘opposite coast’ of Istanbul. He would never cease to convey his passionate attachment to that place by telling people how he had given refuge to a childhood friend, Apostol, at his house during the September Incidents; he would also narrate this to his six-year-old nephew during a trip to Beyoğlu, holding him by the hand, showing him the devastation and the rabble caused by the events referred to the day before, saying to him: “A sight which you will never again witness in your lifetime!” thus reaffirming to himself, this evil act, perhaps with a faint hope of returning to those days of yore, years after his love affair.
Yearnings, disappointments, simple joys . . . They had lived this love, in their confined space, learning in installments what forbidden love might bring or take away from them. Believing that they had earned their requited love at the cost of all the experiences they had had to face, in total disregard of other people, of traditions and of the suffering of those they had left behind, without hiding themselves behind other people and forsaking tradition. This determination explains why they had preferred to keep detached from their families. It goes without saying that patience was required in order to be able to properly understand their sentiments and lifestyle choices once seen in their proper places. Through the years, religious holidays had always been occasions of lost opportunity, visits home made tentatively, a timid attempt at reconciliation. Home, for them, was now different, having undergone a process of gradual transformation; such visits were approached with circumspection and suspicion. And so, they proved fruitless. Filling the void that had come about in the course of their absence had already become impossible. It was too late, the links forming the backbone had been severed at the base and the bridges had all been burned.
Madame Estreya, had, according to an unwarranted assumption, been converted to Islam, assuming the name Yıldız. However, in the long run, it became clear that this had been a monstrous lie. This might also have been a stratagem to cope with the difficulties encountered at the time from that remote realm. Moreover, such an undertaking might provide certain clues to other realities that lay in deeper strata. Nevertheless, such a decision would have to have been made solely by Madame Estreya, just like in those days when banishment was still practiced. As far as I know, Muhittin Bey was an indulgent man, a lenient and refined character who would be loath to espouse such trickery as a means to resolution, even in light of those circumstances.
After his retirement, he occasionally came to pay a visit to Monsieur Jacques. Those were the times when he had closed his little grocery store at Kadıköy Pazarı, the one that glanced from a distance at Balıkpazarı in Galatasaray with a plebeian look. I remember him from those days. I believe neither Madame Roza nor Madame Estreya knew anything of these visits. However, I must acknowledge I haven’t the slightest evidence to prove this. On the other hand, I may well be mistaken in my observation and be the victim of an illusion thoroughly devoid of substance. The fact is that I just feel inclined to find credence in such an unlikely scenario in order to believe once more in this improbable story, a story which I one day hope to revisit in search of the truth. This is not so bad; after all, when one thinks of the shortcuts we dare to take for the sake of those yearnings we keep postponing and patiently waiting. To experience the passion of pursuing those scraps of expectation was necessary after all for embracing a new day, yes, the dawn of a new day.