Istanbul Was a Fairy Tale (94 page)

We remained sitting for a while before he stood up slowly, having been convinced that he had had his share of conversation. I made as though I was going to make a comment. He stopped short, pointing to somewhere on the opposite coast, to the sea or to the shore . . . as though he was implying that he could not set out on that journey with me. He might have gone to that place which I believe I’ll reach one day. For the moment I was to stay where I was, on the last coast I could descry . . .

( . . . ) Now we are once again alone with our fantasies, our stories which we cannot share with others . . . there once again . . . at the spot we deserve . . . we had loved each other for a flight we had been nurturing and for which we had been waiting to take for a good many years . . . for a flight . . . because flights fitted loves . . . flights fitted loves . . . we had desired to believe firmly in this legend of flight; but were we ever able to attain the meaning that lay within us of this flight? Now once again we are eating, making love, and dying with that which we had taken shelter from. Love, love that we sublimated, got transformed into a homicide after the trespass of a given boundary. After all love meant dying in somebody’s arms, didn’t it? Love was a play of loneliness with a different name, wasn’t it? Love consisted of a few photographs, leftovers from those old deceptions which we had lived absentmindedly in our rooms, in our rooms alone, alien to others, distant from them, did it not? Had we not brought to these homicides barbed wires and minefields meant to protect us, considering our values and the assumption that nakedness was shameful? Under the circumstances how and by which representations can we ever convey to others what we are going through within the confines of these boundaries? The city was replete with stories unknown to others, which could not be lived by outsiders. Our brains had been stuffed with knowledge that made true knowledge inaccessible.

All that had been experienced might be explained perhaps by our inability to transform ourselves into chrysalides, by the pain such a failure involved. Does this little death not explain also the deafness and the sense of abandonment? Was that deafness and sense of abandonment a gift given to us because of our striving to live a long life? When I think about all of this I see before me millions of chrysalides . . . when I think about all this . . . I want to become immoral . . .

Yes, immoral, to be immoral in order not to disappoint the expectations of those who bestowed to us those monumental constructions and extensive knowledge. To be immoral, to know how to to be immoral . . . in order to finally discover my own morality, to discover myself in another morality . . . According to those with such expectations, there is no sense in what is being told here, anyhow. The heroes of those stories fell in love in those worlds, in those lives, in the same way for the same fantasies and illusions. The heroes in those stories could betray each other or themselves by following the same path, they felt remorse for having answered the calls of the same road or abiding in the same lie. Every human being had his own unforgettable photographs, streets, and little shops. If so, why on earth did I want to tell all this? There is no one answer to this question. Perhaps, I just wanted to speak about myself, about those colors, about the histories and stories that those languages have left with us. I don’t know to what extent I have been successful in this, taking into account my expectations and efforts. Frankly I don’t know. The only thing I know now is that I will not go back there for quite some time; I don’t want to. At present I’m thinking of one of those typical, ordinary beaches which I’ll never cease to speak about . . . typical, ordinary, a place that everybody will experience . . . I may light a cigarette . . . I can walk into the sea naked . . . I can return to that human being with those words despite all that has occurred in the meantime . . . I can return to that person with those words . . . “Tell me,” I can say to him, “tell me once again . . . once again, tell me . . . once again. Tell me for the sake of that place, time, and individual . . . for the sake of that country, for our country . . . tell me another story I can believe in; a story, true, real, without adornments. Tell me, tell me, tell me . . . ”

MARIO LEVI
was born in 1957 in Istanbul. He graduated from Istanbul University’s Faculty of Literature with a degree in French language and literature in 1980. In addition to being a writer, Levi has worked as a French teacher, an importer, a journalist, a radio programmer, and a copywriter.
Istanbul Was a Fairy Tale
is his first novel to be translated into English.

ENDER GÜROL
was born in 1931 and pursued his studies at the English and French Philology Departments of Istanbul University. A prolific translator into Turkish, he has over a hundred books to his credit, including titles by Bertrand Russell, Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, and Carl Jung. His translations into English include
The Time Regulation Institute
by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar.