Istanbul Was a Fairy Tale (60 page)
Read Istanbul Was a Fairy Tale Online
Authors: Mario Levi
Fears, expectations of returns, and the renewed hope of marching on at a new time despite all that had been lost . . . We had gone through all these experiences or had tried to do so once more for Rosy; the experiences we had enjoyed without taking stock of them. We had been asked to find the individuals we had mislaid somewhere. This peremptory call was for those who were invited to find for themselves a new and precise place relating to a past lived imperfectly. We did hear the call; actually we would never be able to do away with it. Miraculously, after so many years, Juliet was to remember those seven days of mourning Nora had spent in Istanbul. Seven long days and seven long nights spent, during which mother and daughter had been inextricably close to one another, although in a different dimension in which motherhood and daughterhood had coalesced. Retaliations and frank talks had indeed been embarked upon despite fears, faults, and evasions. The term had been but a short one, if past experiences were to be considered; yet, the time was real despite those dreams doomed to remain inexplicable and unshared to the very end; a real and ‘lived’ time, a time whose due had been given; a correct time recorded in history to remain stamped on one’s memory. The term was not so important under the circumstances; what was important was to rediscover the years lost, to add meaning to them and to find a room for that sentiment. Why had they tarried so long, why had they had to wait so long? Had their steps been taken with a view to avoiding a new death, a new void, a new deficiency and regression? Had those steps been taken toward a different future? What future was it? Whose future deserved to be carried forward? To provide answers to these questions, to take up this challenge may be impossible for a great many people. It may be that these questions are better ignored like a good many lives and stories. Otherwise, the history of those who had failed and would fail to catch time by the hands, the history of those that has not been told and that has slipped through one’s fingers would not come back to us as a gaping wound during those nights. All things considered, I cannot help feeling that Juliet and Nora had had the courage to enter each other’s solitude. This probability arouses in me the hope of the breaking of a new dawn. I feel that I’m gradually, stealthily approaching those people whose stories I will be able to disclose and believe I’ll be capable of telling. I know that this experience is the warmth of self-reliance; the warmth of a self-reliance I cannot discover embedded in words. I might choose to come to a standstill here and to abide at this very spot, but a lot of questions crowd in on me. For instance, what had been the topics of discussion, what recollections had accompanied them to the darkness? What had drawn them to each other so closely? Was it the deep grief occasioned by the death of a loved one, or their meeting over the feeling of regret that the loss had engendered in them which would enable them to cling to one another? I might consider these possibilities and search diligently for the exact words required. Frankly, to try to explain this approach based only on these causes seems to me a time honored way of dealing with things, commendable by a good many spectators and heroes. Something was missing . . . something . . . an addition of great importance although modest in appearance. This was the exclusivity of Juliet and Nora. This was partly due to the despair, my despair, expressed in the story. This section then would be lived and was actually lived in this fashion by other people. Narration was a new missing link for which I had to find a place; a missing link that enabled me to have a fresh look one morning. There is only one thing that seems meaningful to me about those days, something Juliet had told me. On the night of the sixth day, after they had seen off the guests, mother and daughter had gone out for a long walk. A deadly silence hung over the town. The magic of the night penetrated into one’s very marrow. They walked on for some time hand in hand without uttering a word. Then they were engulfed by a shower which did not prevent them from continuing their march. They seemed to have traversed that place where words failed yet found their true meanings. The shower was their shower; the rain they had failed to live, the rain they had mislaid somewhere, the rain they had withheld from each other. As they approached the house, Juliet had asked; “Will you return?” To which Nora retorted: “Never!” Then they had lapsed into silence and restored their own voices. It appeared that this was the moment when they had best understood each other. Then Nora left the next evening as she had her own people in a different place.
Nobody had cried for Rosy, or if they did, they had preferred not to make a show of it. There was a time for crying, a time for conversing, and for feeling the need to carry on a real dialogue. We were preserving the posterity of petty details; we had learned how to do so. Other discourses, other subjects of dispute, and other suspended judgments and systematic doubts had been imposed. The subjects of dispute and the suspended judgments occupied mostly the minds of the guests, to wit, the spectators. We, in our turn, were supposed to remain passive and content, simply lending an ear to what was being told. Keeping silent and listening . . . these indicated our interest in those voices and the fact that we were desirous to coexist with them. Those subjects of dispute and the suspended judgments and systematic doubts had prompted a new absurdity within me. I knew, nevertheless, that every absurdity, every sentence that appeared simple, had a spot to which someone might sooner or later be drawn. My return to those voices was inevitable for the narration of the story. One of the questions propounded had to do with having a better insight into Rosy’s last moment. How come a woman so well-off had not hired a charwoman who would clean the panes but instead decided to do it herself? Was it merely an accident? The probability of suicide was not a far-fetched assumption for those who inquired into the incident. Had this shared assumption had any plausibility, one would meditate on the cause that drove a woman with a three-year-old child to suicide. Then endless court cases . . . the person who would suffer the most would be the little child of course. The man, with such wealth, would certainly remarry. Had this ever occurred to her? It would not be difficult to provide an answer to this question at that stage. That was the reason Rosy had figured in that story as a woman who was not conscious of her responsibilities. This was obviously one of the ways to dispose of the grief that Rosy’s tragic death had caused. Thus, histories would assume new meanings. All the heroes of that story, every one of them, knew that girl in his or her own fashion. Recollections had not been preserved for nothing. The girl was an original type, composed and reserved. One might well have seen her fall into the darkness. The case might be closed as far as its witnesses were concerned. Nevertheless, I, for my part, have never ceased to believe that another interpretation, far beyond the suggested ones, should be sought. I never questioned the way she died; yet, what had driven her to it nobody could imagine. This moot point might lead us to a Rosy different from the Rosy we used to know, a Rosy we had failed to picture during her lifetime. This point I have carried with me for years. No need to say that this supposition had no rationale on which I could base my assumption. It was a hunch, a mere hunch, a strong intuitive feeling hard to express in words. The story would, in time, gradually exclude its other heroes. I knew for a fact that the hope was not a new one, a hope that loomed ahead somewhere. It seemed that we were doomed to repair to our respective abodes. However, I’m no longer eager to seek new interpretations; in the meantime, in this connection I must not forget to mention that this conviction of mine has opened new doors to me. At the place I had expected to reach were memories related to other hours embedded in preserved emotions. It would take some years before it would finally seem as though I had come close to the real cause.
We had raised a toast to the memory of Rosy that evening
It was a summer evening and the city seemed deserted once again. I felt that this evening would be experienced differently by others, as an evening deserved to be truly lived. Something drove me to that tavern which I had not visited for quite a while. To be frank, I’d had no taste for taverns and drinking sprees. Notwithstanding this lack of enthusiasm in me, my steps took me to that tavern by the seaside. The sea was blue, as blue as could be. In a small secluded borough of that metropolis called Istanbul which I couldn’t leave that summer, it had occurred to me to experience for a couple of hours the delight of contemplating the beautiful scenery which I had been missing for ages. My fate seemed to be sealed; this longing would open the way for me to certain experiences in defiance of the disadvantageous consequences these might entail. I had had a premonition; it was as if I had been dragged there by that man. This was inevitable; it was a question of the revelation of a secret which had tempted me. I must have already mentioned somewhere before: I feel myself related by blood to such stories, like a dream wanderer walking along a long story. My visit to that tavern was earlier than the wonted hours. At one of the tables by the seaside sat two women and two men who looked as though they had been waiting for someone. That play seemed to have been displaced to another scene with new words. New words, new looks . . . New looks and new moments meant different souvenirs and different solitudes; you might also speak of these as different seas and different deaths. Maybe it was because of this that they sat in an unusual silence. They had put the lid on or had already exhausted what they had wanted to disclose to each other. However, there were at times a few exchanges of words, after which they lapsed into silence once again, and as if they were at a loss as to what to do, they turned their gazes to the sea and stared at it, musing. Their reticence and their eyes that transfixed each other reminded one of horror films. They looked as if they had been waiting for someone for years. They stared at the tables with familiar looks and so the tables observed them in return with the same familiarity. They seemed to have resolutely decided to stay. No, they would stand their ground. This plot had occurred to me right there at that round counter. Had I ventured to pursue my line of thought perhaps I might have run into something more expected. Yet, I had suddenly realized that the man who was seated opposite me and whose looks were fixed on me gave me the overriding sensation that I had seen him before, as if I remembered the contours of someone I had left somewhere in the past. I had felt his presence right at the moment when I was busy bringing together a couple of new words in a couple of new sentences for a story I was going to write in which other people would figure. His looks seemed to conceal, to conjure up, and expose certain things that had a meaning of their own. Well, my glances had reciprocated his. He smiled and looked as though he had been awaiting my reaction. Leaving his chair, he approached me. The individual that was drawing near me was no stranger; he wasn’t a hero of a fiction or play who had relinquished his place in somebody else’s story in order to intrude into mine. I had been the custodian of a little but valuable souvenir. A souvenir which I had had some difficulty mentioning to date, but one that I recognized, one I’d been keeping in a distant night of mine. The gap in my memory, even though for a fleeting moment, had vexed me. Nonetheless, I had eventually been able to recall him. He was the person who had left a strong impression on me that night which I’d paid a visit to Rosy to give her the silver picture frame, with the songs he had sung to the accompaniment of a guitar he played himself, reeking of alcohol. He had said that he had a wide repertoire. He was a professional musician who had performed for many years in nightclubs. He prided himself on being able to sing in fourteen languages. He remembered that he had proposed to sing in Arabic, Hebrew, and Armenian. That night, as a finale, he had sung an Armenian song. I am not of course in a position to judge how perfect his accent had been and the degree of veracity of that Armenian song. All that I knew was the song was quite different from the other songs that he had sung. Having finished it, he paused and said: “You know what, my late mother used to love that song. Today is her anniversary. As she lay dying, she spoke in a delirium of her childhood days in Van. I’ve never been to Van myself . . . ” A silence had ensued, an almost absolute silence. At first we all delved into our respective silences. Some had gone back to their prior birthday celebrations, some to their occasions of mourning which had united us in the verses of that song. The silence we had fallen into was then broken by our warm applause. Music had seemed even more beautiful that night, the songs that expressed once again our tissue of lies, our photographs classified in our chests of drawers. The person who had performed those songs had taken us by storm without a doubt; yet, what we truly applauded were other beings, namely those individuals whom we were reluctant to unearth. We were but a limited number of people that night in that house who would stand the test of time nestled in those songs. Rosy had listened in rapture to this friend of hers who seemed not to stand on ceremony during his frequent visits to the house. The last song sung had brought tears to her eyes, as it did for all of us. The man no longer worked in nightclubs. He had worked hard and become a prominent figure in the business world where he thought he had found himself at home. Eventually, he had reaped the fruit of his labors and was promoted to the position of executive in an industrial concern. He looked overly tired, but his position was rewarded with a generous salary. He had witnessed the pride that his father, a retired general, had felt for him. I did remember him! He stood nearer to me now. As though he had read my mind he had said: “Indeed! Just as you have remembered . . . ” His black hair and beard had turned grey. “Except for this sprinkling of grey,” he added. Observing my shudder, he had placed his hand on my shoulder and ordered the waiter to fill up our glasses. This was a theatrical show, no doubt, a cameo. I was supposed to know that he was well-known in those surroundings, according to the story. We were both served raki which we had diluted with water. The white cheese and the melon, the
sine qua non
snack of raki, were on the table and it was a summer evening. The tables were being honored by the presence of the regular customers. The people seated at the other table who appeared as though they were expecting someone were still there: the person they had been looking forward to seeing had not shown up yet. The streetlights were being lit and the sea seemed to flow bluer than ever. It was time for many individuals to call to mind Bodrum. The man seemed to sing in an undertone, uttering barely audible words that ran something like this: “Hi! You’ve called me, haven’t you? Well, here I am . . . Who are you with now? Are you alone there? Or are you breathing for somebody else?”
We clinked our glasses and without uttering a single word we continued to sip at our raki. “Nice song . . . It’s been ages since I’ve been touched by a song . . . ” he said. “We are ever ready to hear such songs . . . Haven’t we left somewhere on our way our dear ones to whom we were deeply attached?” I rejoined. No answer came from him; he had merely nodded in approval. “What wind has swept you here?” he asked afterward. “I really don’t know; but, I may have heard your voice calling me here,” I observed. He smiled at this. “You should make use of it in a story,” he suggested. “I certainly will,” I answered, to which he reacted once more with a smile. “What have you been doing lately?” he inquired then. “Well,” I rejoined, “I’m spinning a long story of which I cannot fathom the end . . . Some of us have gone very far,” I said laconically. He added nothing to this. His looks bespoke the realization of my words. “What about you?” I inquired. There was no answer. The silence was compensated for by our sipping at the raki. I had wished to know of his exploits since I had lost sight of him for a good while. “Yes; how about you? What have you been doing in the meantime?” I asked. The question begged an answer, evidently. His smiling face betrayed a secret to which he seemed proud, similar to the guilty secret of an urchin. “You’d not believe it!” he said. “Don’t say you have resumed your former trade as a musician?” I dared to suggest. With a furtive glance he had made a gesture of hand as though denying the suggestion. Then he said bluntly: “I have a meatball restaurant.” At my bewildered expression, he continued, saying: “You’re surprised, aren’t you? As a matter of fact it was a shock for everybody. However, believe it or not, I’m as happy as a clam. What’s important for me is the conviction that I’ve found what I’ve been looking for. It was two years ago, I had to make a snap decision. Up until then I had been working in that plant; I was listless; I believed that my life had found security; I was entitled to a pension. I didn’t have to work to the point of exhaustion; thus I led a carefree life. One day, just as I was about to quit work and call it a day, I received a file from the general manager. I was asked to study and give a detailed report on it the following morning. I was to stay on the premises until late at night. I had had other experiences of the sort, but that evening I had other fish to fry. Had it not been so, I would have acquiesced to it. The woman whom I knew solely through her voice on the phone and whom I’d been trying to persuade to go out to dinner with me had at last yielded to my entreaties. I hadn’t actually seen her; I’d known her through our telephone conversations. Like in fiction, isn’t it? As a matter of fact, we had been living as heroes and heroines of a fiction during those days. A pure coincidence had brought us into contact, a newspaper notice. One Sunday morning, as I was browsing the dailies just to kill time, I had come across a small notice; a woman was offering her services to those who wanted to learn the Ottoman language. Suppose you felt out of sorts and wanted to find a hobby like stamp collecting, painting, woodworking, gardening, that is outside one’s regular occupation, something you find particularly interesting and enjoy doing in a nonprofessional way as a source of relaxation, wouldn’t you be tempted to dial her up? Without a further thought, I called her up. The speaker at the other end of the line might well have been an elderly lady, one of those ladies of old from Istanbul. However, the velvety voice on the telephone seemed to belong to a young woman; it was like a voice I had been in pursuit of all my life, a voice which had been waiting for me. My initial intention had been to hang up after having learning of her situation. It was not an every day occurrence; a woman was offering her services as a teacher. Well, our conversation lasted for about two hours; what we discussed covered a vast gamut of topics, at the conclusion of which I had the sagacity of giving her my telephone number. I received a call from her the very next day. We talked and talked and recited poems to each other. Not many people know that I love reciting poems. My mother had imported from the East, from
her
East, an infinite number of poems which she used to read to me on certain nights. Mountains, running water, and small hamlets were often the themes worked upon. Terrors and deaths lurked during those nights. The verses she recited were the verses of forgotten songs. Dirges they were, songs expressing grief and a solemn sense of loss. She used to recite them to me especially during the nights in which she seemed to miss certain things and felt lonely. She used to express her estrangement from Istanbul in this way. I fancied I was nearest to her on such nights. Those verses had inspired in me not only a different solitude, but brought on solitude itself. That’s why I was particularly fond of those verses. This had unearthed my own poems, or caused me to believe that I’d discovered them. The verses I had recited to her on the telephone were exactly the poems that were part and parcel of my being. Her verses, on the other hand, were in a different vein. Our topics of discussion were not poems, of course. We elaborated on life’s major issues, on people we had lost or imaginary lives that we indulged in. It was as though we had desired to pull down the wall between us. We didn’t expect to see each other. I had even sung songs to her. For the first time in ages, I thought I was singing warmly. Three or four months went by in this fashion, engaging in internal talks. One step remained; just one step which we believed was a decisive one, but which we continued to put off. She must’ve been aware, as I was, that this step would be far from easy. At long last I blurted out that we had to see each other. She seemed to be reluctant at first, for fear of disappointment. The disappointment might not be unilateral, she said. She was right perhaps. Ours had been a purely magical experience; the spell might be broken. Yet I was insistent; I asserted that the words we’d exchanged had been in need of a concrete touch, and the worst that we could expect might perhaps be our avoidance of each other’s glances. She understood; she couldn’t do otherwise anyhow. A short time after, as I was speaking about a TV series, she expressed that she would assent to my wish and was ready to face all possible untoward events. I was getting prepared to meet her and was wondering whether the dream I’d had for many years would finally come true. The venue was a restaurant at Kandilli, by the sea of the Bosporus. The story would come to an end on an autumn evening. The hero was coming, having experienced a death whose effects would linger in him for quite some time to come. The death was the death of other human beings; many a life would fade away in oblivion. It may be because of this that the hero had imagined the venue to be an island; having perused the story I’d concluded that actually I was not very far removed from the idea of an island; of an island within us in which I would be seeking refuge. I’d already told her about this story. That restaurant might well have belonged to us. When the report from management was given to me on my desk, I had plainly seen the reality which I then wanted to shun. I felt that it was the end of my career there. Without informing anybody of my actions and being forgetful of all the petty things which I had been dealing with cheek by jowl for so many years, I made myself scarce, leaving all of it behind. On the report I just inscribed in capital letters: ‘DAMN ALL OF YOU!’ I thus repudiated with a sleight of hand the labor of ten long years. They sent for me and begged me to go back to work as I could not possibly leave everything up in the air. But I’d done it, once and for all. What I’d left behind no longer belonged to me. I declined all their calls. I had to face the opprobrium of my colleagues; they failed to lure me back to my desk as I was resolute and firm in my decision. I couldn’t convince them of my opinion and the course of action I had decided upon; I never tried to, anyway. I couldn’t resist the lure of the table I was going to share that night in the company of that mysterious woman. You won’t believe it, but I proposed to her right away, without standing on ceremony. And she accepted. It’s been three years now since we’ve been married. We have opened a small joint where she prepares meatballs. There are no more Sisyphean chores. Colleagues pop in now and then; they say in admiration that I had been right in my decision; the very people who had held me in contempt. I told them that I’d eventually found a place that belonged to me; a place where I belonged together with those I believed belonged to me,” he concluded. “You might just as well say: I’m with individuals who I think belong to me, who I would like to think belong to me. I’m just fine, and yet I’m here!” I observed. He inclined his head toward his breast as if trying to cover up his confusion and took a sip from his drink. “I wish we had met before,” I remarked. “Indeed!” he said and added: “There should be someone willing to write our story, our stories, in fact.” “Are we not the authors of our stories, of our own stories, at least?” I inquired. “You’re right there,” he answered, “we’d like to return to those days to see how we trod such a path.” We had stopped. Silence was the venue where we had stopped; the individuals that our silence embraced in protection, our hours during which we had forgotten each other, of whose disappearance we had taken stock. Our taciturnity buried our regrets, our desire to recapture the moments when we had died hoping to be resurrected and to return like people who had had the experience of death more than once, as heroes. “Were I to tell all these things, I don’t think I would ever be able to find ears willing to listen to your adventure; they would think I had concocted it,” I added afterward. “Maybe we are lonely just because of this,” he rejoined as though corroborating my observation. “There are so many stories we cannot give voice to; so many episodes we have experienced, the truth of which we cannot convince others of. We are the slaves of these stories . . . ” I continued. A silence had seemed necessary at this moment and we filled the gap by sipping at our drinks. The scent of anise mixed with the odor of the melon associated in us a very long story. There were people who enjoyed this subtlety with discrimination and appreciation. Just like in the case of the discriminating invitation of certain people to certain houses. “Rosy’s episode was for me one of those stories of bondage. One of those stories I couldn’t get rid of for years, stories that I couldn’t bring myself to convey to others . . . ” he said. To which I added: “As a matter of fact, I had always believed that this episode would come back to me, and, what is far more important, that it would bring me face-to-face with a person who has been waiting for me in an old photograph.” His comment had been: “The story you are going to narrate may well begin with these words.” There was irony in his voice, the irony of a wise man. It was as though he had already come across similar stories elsewhere. This was a sense of nakedness that I had once experienced. I was confused. “If I ever have the skill and the opportunity, of course,” I said bashfully. His smile suggested sincerity. “Well, aren’t we here for that?” he rejoined. We were two people who knew how to resign themselves to their fate, how to endure such an experience. We were acquainted with this sadness. As a matter of fact, this sadness had held us united despite our difference in character. We could henceforward be heading for that photograph. “You know what,” he continued, “Rosy’s tragic death wasn’t a coincidence, it’s just not the case, it couldn’t be.” He then began telling the story with the voice of someone who had come to knock on his friend’s door late at night; it was the story which he had kept to himself and could not bring himself to share, even with his wife. He had seen her on more than one occasion, years ago in a café in Moda, seated at a table with a strang
er. He had succeeded in hiding himself from her view. Apparently Rosy, who sat composed at the table, kept nodding yes. From that distance he could not possibly guess the words they exchanged. The man seemed to be insisting on something without any apparent hope. Who was that stranger, that guest who had intruded upon her life uninvited? The answer could not be guessed. But that man must have had a role in Rosy’s death. However, this did not go beyond an intuitive presumption. A presumption, but one in which he had had an unshakable confidence. My story of Rosy had ended up at an entirely different anchorage following this unexpected development. There was concealed in that place things unutterable that conjured up death. After so many years that place seemed to have become a secret alcove, a tabooed sanctuary. One should demand nothing more from the past. This land of the unknown could be appropriated by us once more; however, it was a land on which we could lay claim, a land in which we could find shelter. We raised our glasses to Rosy, to those to whom we had not been generous enough in terms of affection. After all, we drank in order to be able to find ourselves. “We’ll no longer be able to see each other; nothing can henceforth contrive for our paths to cross.” He seemed to confirm this. After all, who had stayed there and who was capable of what was evident. “Both of us know the reason,” he said. We certainly knew the reason why we had preferred to assent to this mandatory separation. We knew more things that we couldn’t divulge. These should be the crowning words under the circumstances. The tavern had become replete with clients. Other tables, other times . . . And the people that were seated at those tables were still there. The man’s name was Harun. That was the last time I was to see him. He hadn’t mentioned the whereabouts of his steakhouse.