Istanbul Was a Fairy Tale (4 page)

On top of that we should also take into consideration the fiery spirit that those moments held, that lay concealed somewhere, beautiful, unsoiled, and untouched, just because they had yet to be experienced. This may have been the reason why the stories never came to fruition; they just couldn’t be concluded.

As for my approach to the truth, to the things I perceived as a witness . . . Muhittin Bey was an extremist, a member of the People’s Party. He often squabbled with Monsieur Jacques who was a diehard democrat. Their altercations in the shop were a way to add color to their drab existence and ignore what was going on around them. The façade of daily events, known and discussed by everybody, were in fact the shield behind which people concealed their lives. I think there was some common ground where they could reach a brittle understanding, a sentiment I could not identify or define despite all efforts. That space had, I think, been shared at times when the harshness of the world was most sharply felt, a space where they needed no additional words or expressions. The affection that attached them to each other may have been a deep one, subliminally experienced . . . During those days of occasional visits, it had been their custom to eat at the Borsa Restaurant. I had had the opportunity to be present at one or two of those luncheons, during which Monsieur Jacques used to discourse upon the changing times, human beings, and the deterioration of Istanbul’s overall atmosphere. They felt that they were being gradually alienated from the city in which they lived. “Life is a dirty joke,” said Muhittin Bey at one of those luncheons. Life, a dirty joke . . . These seemed, at first, to be the lyrics of a cheap song . . . Yet, when one gives some thought to platitudes one can see how easily they epitomize the lives of so many. Life, a dirty joke . . . This attitude to life was familiar to Monsieur Jacques; he could not possibly feel estranged from a human being who experienced this emotion and who knew how to confront life in this way. I’m sure that there had been, there must have been, a time when he did not consider the husband of his sister as a member of his family, not as an El Turco. This was a time, I think, that lent meaning to that place, a time deeply felt, one that cannot be truly articulated to anyone.

As far as I can infer from the altercations at the shop, Madame Estreya had also become a member of the People’s Party. This was a courageous act by a Jewess who had lived under the Ismet Paşa regime. Yet, she had had many reasons for reacting against that life, against her family.

One evening, Muhittin Bey, who, while singing a song of Selahattin Pınar to the accompaniment of the lute he himself played for the woman with whom he had been living, had suddenly died, reposing his head on his lute, with a faint smile on his lips; a heart attack probably . . . This was the end of him. It was like a joke. This was perhaps Muhittin Bey’s last performance, a performance that represented his attitude to life and his position in it. This is why I never forgot his maxim: “Life is a dirty joke.” He had left his song unfinished. This perspective, this ‘moment of eternity’ suited his world well. It was Monsieur Jacques who had arranged the funeral service. To my mind this is a detail not to be overlooked.

This was the story of Muhittin Bey and Estreya. No child was born to them. Was there any particular reason for this? Pills perhaps? According to Madame Roza, there was a reason for it. According to Monsieur Jacques, this was a question that begged no explanation, a question that could not easily be explained. It was as if this had been a secret shared between two people, between him and Muhittin Bey. It was a secret of a shared life, a double-edged secret which could only have been disclosed and explained unilaterally. The secret was one of those destined to remain buried along with the departed.

Madame Estreya had not gone back to her own people after Muhittin Bey’s death; she had not even shortened the intervals between her usual visits to the house she had had to abandon years before, let alone returned. The doors had been irrevocably closed. Those two lives were no longer the same. If my memory serves me well, she herself had gone the way of all flesh, broken by the thought of a life spent alone, separated from the man with whom she wished to spend it. Her body was discovered by her neighbors. Such incidents were apparently a daily occurrence in the neighborhood, in any case.

As I brood over these things now, I ask myself now and then the reason why Monsieur Robert and Aunt Tilda had treated their elder sister with such indifference. I can still remember the turn of events which always remained a mystery to me. In such a mood, I try to believe in the existence of those days and nights that I’m no nearer understanding, but yet were experienced by others. However, if a gap in the sequence of events did occur, and if such a gap was risked with all its related consequences, Madame Estreya must have been responsible for this gap. The rest was mere fancy, resignation, and despair. For, she was one of those who knew how to close one’s doors at the right time. Otherwise, no meaning could have been elucidated or defended, at least none worthy to be defended for the sake of those days passed in exile.

Through her death, that repast in which we took as part of a duty, so to speak, Madame Estreya stayed in my life in this guise always at arm’s length; she preferred to remain aloof and was treated with a frosty silence in general; she exercised her discretion by opting for a life at home, for a life of self-annihilation, rather than setting out on a long journey. All things considered, she abided in her feminine identity as someone whose solitude had been awarded to her, not feeling ashamed in the least, always self-satisfied and alive, and—this is particularly important—meeting all the challenges she encountered on her way bravely without the least complaint. I may, perhaps, by this addition, explain the fact that there was no one left to say farewell to nor anyone from whose underclothing she could have torn a piece from on the occasion of that modest ritual (which has always thrilled me) when she returned from the realm in which she had opted to live to the land she had abandoned, by herself, or to be precise, in the image that her body had left behind. None of her relatives lived in that house anymore: Madame Roza had died; Monsieur Robert was in London and was unable to return to Istanbul; Aunt Tilda had not responded to the calls stating that her sister’s soul was in repose all alone in a synagogue with no one to pray for it. Not even the mourner’s kaddish for the deceased had been recited. Those were the days when I had acquired the fundamentals by which one could view time and suffering through the window of humor. The fact that the said prayer was left unrecited meant that I had missed an exiguous performance I would have liked to have borne witness to. This was somehow different from other rituals that called for the presence of a whole congregation. People were wont to pray together in unison without having an inkling of what they uttered, over and over again, tens of thousands of times, in the tongue of a distant world, the distance of which was hardly definable for them, for the mere sake of the perpetuation of an order alien to them. I never forgot those moments. I was sure that they did not know that the prayer they recited was not even in Hebrew, but a far cry from Babylonia, from that ancient exile. However, I cannot ignore the feeling of security that the mere fact of being together gave me while praying with heterogeneous words, that inexpressible feeling of warmth that one can’t help but experience, thus creating a place where one felt, by force of circumstances, the difference which one could not avoid. Leaving aside all these things, in case you wished to advance toward a world out of the ordinary, you might think that the desire that the function which prayer involved could be linked to an experience related to separation and an absolute remembrance.

The words had assumed different meanings in different worlds through beautiful associations . . . Such was the prayer that had not been recited for the soul of Madame Estreya. This was so characteristic of her, especially if one took into consideration the long struggle she had waged in the hope of being understood. She did not want to remain misunderstood by others even after she died. This was the poetic side of what had been experienced, certainly; it was merely a part of the role she played which I had assigned her. The actual truth was naturally different. The prayer had not been recited; at least ten individuals of the male sex had to be present in order that the said prayer might be properly executed. Male and female, we were eight in all, a family of eight at the service. That means the required quorum was lacking, those who were absent had failed to show up once more; they happened to be in places where they were not supposed to be. Madame Estreya had been abandoned to her destiny in every respect. Even in her fatal end. Estreya signified ‘star.’ But her star seemed not to have twinkled for certain people . . . for those who had opted for covenants.

To understand, to try to understand . . . This phrase must have had some relevance not only for those banished from Babylonia, but also for Monsieur Jacques who never ceased to tell me about the adventures of the prophets Abraham and Solomon and Joseph and David who are still alive in my imagination as legendary figures. Death left men face-to-face with the varying solitudes experienced in the depths of one’s soul. Monsieur Jacques was, at the time, embedded in a solitude far removed from the play that was being enacted, in a loneliness unattainable by other human beings. One could infer this from his reluctance, after the recital of prayers, to sit at the table which had remained unchanged throughout the years and which had dispatched many a soul to the world without return; at the table that remained unaltered, forever unalterable; but where he ate with relish, sitting in one of the armchairs whose covers had not been removed, sipping at his raki, the contents of his plate which consisted of a few olives, a slice of white cheese, homemade aniseed-flavored toast, and, last but not least, the borekita (flaky pastry) prepared by the skillful hands of Madame Roza who knew well the proper degree of its consistency, which he devoured to crown his repast, that delicacy which I associated with those summer mornings that had been mislaid somewhere in the past. Now I can fit him in that frame once more. He had before him the tripod encrusted with mother-of-pearl on which he placed his glass of raki which he was to make a gift of to Berti and Juliet after the demise of Madame Roza, as a token of remembrance of an occasion of no great bearing yet one which was unforgettable. His fingers wandered on the designs on that tripod. Everything associated with that flaky pastry, eggplants consumed with raki, every design on that tripod set a person out on an altogether different journey, giving the clues of life, of their lives, that had been mislaid somewhere else. Madame Roza also had gone the way of all flesh just like Olga. There was thus a place where one was condemned to abide for eternity. This was perhaps the place that essentially belonged to her, a place where she had ended up after so many vicissitudes. The time came to finally connect to the correct place for the first time, without evasion or postponements . . . This was the only way to explain the lingering of his gaze on the old pocket watch, which he eyed with a wry smile. I knew the story, or, to be precise, the stories that that silver watch concealed. There were men who had put faith at different times in different climates. These men, who conversed among themselves in a totally different tongue, converged within that timepiece, amongst the labyrinthine paths of that watch. I had been obsessed with the detailed designs on it. Only time would tell whether I would be allowed or denied access to that world. For, I might choose to stay in one of those rooms and hide there, experiencing the pleasure of my flight. No need to say that this was a risky path to take. How else would I be disposed to express my desire to see myself while gazing at those people?

The watchmaker from Odessa

It has been my desire to share with some people the fact that certain loves have no end, and continue forever and ever muffled somewhere in the course of one’s life in defiance of separations, just like those relations that continue even after death, like certain words, pictures, and objects that acquire, on that long path, viability by assuming additional meanings. There are an infinite number of reasons for my believing that the said path is a long one, a very long one at that. For one reason, I may mention the watch that reminded Monsieur Jacques, with some misgiving, of Olga whenever the issue of time was brought up. Whose meaning was concealed in those modest, repressive nights. Time had passed for certain people which involved the impossibility of severance and parting. To compensate for certain inaudibility and irretrievability, it was necessary to explain certain things, whenever words failed, by an individual’s access to certain alternative logic. As a matter of fact, everybody was aspiring to approach that line of horizon within himself, to search for immortality, in one way or another.

Monsieur Jacques must have had certain recollections containing certain minor details relating to the night when that ancient Ukrainian pocket watch had become part of him, memories destined to remain a secret between two individuals. Still, those caught at unwarranted times, whose glances and words betrayed and who tried to hide themselves behind these words, were able, over a course of time, to shed light on a dimly lit path, provided, of course, that fallibility was taken into consideration. The most important clue that I could discover in this story, which somehow enabled me to be transported to those distant lives, was the fact that this watch was the legacy of Olga’s father, and that it had built a bridge between certain lives in ancient Odessa: those people dating from childhood who irrevocably undergo transformation as the years go by and who return to us in new guises. This tale had its origin, I think, in one of those bygone days, in a bygone time . . . expecting to add meaning to different lives with different dream fragments, in different climates, with insignificant illusions . . . I knew this feeling. Under the circumstances, my progression toward a new fantasy, toward a new mystery, was inevitable. In order that I might attain my objective, even though little by little I was, as usual, in need of certain questions, even though they might be left unanswered. Hadn’t we treaded this path in order to give birth to certain tales for ourselves in total disregard of others, of the actual heroes of those tales who were far removed from us and who lived in different places with different sentiments and rules? Hadn’t those tales flourished partly because of this and formed our identities? Who had been the life companion of this watchmaker, for instance? Which odors had he smelled at home? What had been his fantasies and anticipations while making a particular watch in a particular shop or workshop, which, at times, served also as his refuge? What had prompted Olga’s father to make the story of that watch travel farther than Odessa? Precious words and images, transported by people during compulsory journeys to different climates; inexhaustible hours, words, and images that with their very special associations regenerated hope . . . The story had assumed a very different temporal dimension through quite a different hand at that old apartment of Olga’s in Şişli. Meanings attached to journeys and points of no return had become diversified. Details unpredictably changed at the most unexpected moment; also our journeys and the course of our lives, in which we wanted to have a firm belief, cast all doubts away. It may have been a gift by a friend intended as a keepsake, in order to transform a separation into a union through a different path. All things considered, no one recognized the watchmaker from Odessa. This gave rise to a multitude of questions, probabilities, and consequently to the proliferation of rumors. For instance, that watch might not have been made for a friend, if one bears in mind the awe-inspiring character of that young woman from Riga; in this, a sentiment, expressed allusively, in a totally different way, without recourse to any verbal expression, might have been involved; just like many other similar sentiments that have failed to have been properly experienced, a sentiment that might have been waiting for a different occasion, dreaming of and nourishing another point in time. Have you never experienced or heard from others the accounts of someone taking a wrong refuge?