Istanbul Was a Fairy Tale (40 page)

At this juncture, there is a point I arrive at as if groping along blindly based on what Aunt Tilda had said and in which I should like to have perfect confidence; only thus can I make headway in examining that life. I keep on telling myself that this had been the conclusion of the drift of that march and that the rationale of the story and its purport could not have been otherwise. This enables me to take a few more steps; a few steps forward, small ones though, but they are likely to take on new meanings which will enable me to provide new definitions. Aunt Tilda had moved into another territory which seemed to have had a serious effect on her life. This territory had been denoted by Joseph when least expected, after a long time spent lingering. Who was the inhabitant of that climate, beyond that boundary? What had been the reason for this long delay and anticipation? What had compelled Joseph to wait for so long? Why had he preferred to remain aloof as an onlooker amid the turmoil raging in his heart? Had this been due to his strong attachment to his wife, his one true woman, who had dominated his imagination so much as to not allow any room for the emergence of new imagery and caused his reluctance to see in the photographs the images of those individuals he wanted to shun so much against his will? Had the clues of such an expectation not been revealed during those Asmalimescit nights? I think I have a better insight into this mystery at present. To seek answers to these questions I go back to a sentence which finds more and more credence in me from day-to-day in connection with this part of the story. Aunt Tilda and Joseph had lived in a climate where they had spent their most pleasant days, removed from others for the first time, during which time dreams and realities were woven together, when they had snatched themselves from them in order to live their own life. Thus, they had closed their doors to their distant dreams . . . In the said climate, both of them had been mere kids. In that stream of time, during which they had tried to explore each other, they may have failed to exercise their discretion regarding the steps they were supposed to take; that may have been the reason why those days had come back to me in different guises and garbs. A special point, amid all these clumsy behaviors, shows once more how the path of love is clear once the door is opened. Aunt Tilda had, after the conversation that night, done something she had never done before, even under the effect of alcohol, and put her head on Joseph’s chest and fallen asleep. In her dream she had seen herself in the company of Joseph in a nightclub to which she had never been before, dancing to the accompaniment of a song that stirred her to the depths of her soul. “We’ll be dancing forever and ever, Tilda, until eternity,” Joseph kept whispering in her ear, “ . . . until eternity; a journey with no return! Yes, until eternity; till we collapse exhausted on the dance floor; till we exhale our last breaths toward each other . . . ” Then, due perhaps to the effect of these words, she had suddenly regained consciousness. It was midnight. A strong wind clattered the windowpanes. Joseph was awake. “Take me to Asmalımescit,” he said to Tilda, “I’m fed up with this place.” They packed up early in the morning and left. Their personal effects could be counted on one hand. Certain dresses were to be worn only in particular places; they had to be put on for those places, reserved for those places only. Emotions associated with certain objects gradually died down in the depths of experiences. “We’ll come back in July,” said Tilda, “when the weather gets warmer.” To which Joseph had answered with a mild smile saying: “For the first time in my life the month of July seems to be so distant.”

It was a cold day in March. They felt like stretching their legs and had started to stroll down the island’s alley when they saw a phaeton pass by, which they had both hailed at the same time. They traveled in the horse-drawn carriage up until the boat station, their ears full of the echoes of distant voices and sounds. Joseph said to her that as a child he had been motivated by the desire to sit next to the coachman. It appeared that Tilda also had the same burning desire. This had provoked in her the desire to tell him about her youth. This desire was the kind of joy that a good many people had lost in the process of concealing their childhood; however, it had so happened that this desire was called to be unearthed at this juncture. The phaeton was a proof of this, it had emerged out of the blue on a cold day of March: It was a day when trees, deceived by glimmering sunlight, bloomed as though in defiance of the approaching spell of cold air and storms . . .

Aboard the ship, Joseph had remained silent. He had a wan expression. He had suddenly stood up, telling her that he wanted to get some fresh air; and up on the deck he stood for a long while contemplating the wake of the ship. Could it be that the white foam from the top of the waves stirred in his mind childhood reminiscences? As she scrutinized this man who was gliding away from her, Aunt Tilda had wanted to sneak into this memory emerging from the store of his imagination and hold the hand of that child aboard the ship. She had failed to do so and realized that the boundary built on the island had been the last step and could not be trespassed. There was a place where two people heading for each other had to stop, a place which associated in one a lack of resonance, a sense of abandonment; it was a concrete fact, the meaning of which lay hidden in the dark and more often than not remained a mystery to us.

Joseph had broken into the apartment at Asmalımescit as a visitor, as a stranger; he had not turned on the radio, nor put a disc on the gramophone. For days, he found himself absorbed in a book which he had covered with a thick white paper with a view to keeping it at a safe distance from Tilda’s scrutiny, dozing off now and then. These were their silent hours which did not prevent them, however, from eating sparingly. At the table, they told each other their childhood memories which they had not brought out into the open with any other person until then. Joseph had developed the habit of getting up early in the day to sit by the window and listen to “the voices and sounds of the dawning day,” as he referred to it. The voices and the sounds redolent with odors of their own, exclusively belonging to those streets; to the streets laden with expectations for some, and conducive to regeneration and postponement for others. That book Joseph had been perusing may well have been described as absolute seclusion. With great patience Joseph moved about without a fixed course, aim, or goal through the pages he browsed, closing his eyelids now and then, as though repeating in
sotto voce
what he had read a while ago. It seems that this had been the only way to lead him there in the end. Joseph had wended his way through the pages of the book silently, furtively, until his body was discovered one morning when the streets, laden with expectations, dawned for some. As far as I could deduce from his dying expression he happened to be on his last legs in any case. He appeared to be sleeping soundly. The book he had been reading was lying on his chest and the index finger he had inserted in it indicated that he had finished reading it. His smiling face displayed serenity. Aunt Tilda had taken the book and put a mark where his finger had been pointing. She had cast a glance at the place marked by an asterisk only after the conclusion of the seventh day after his death. The book was about Amundsen’s reaching the South Pole for the first time, and the mark was exactly at the point of arrival of this explorer from the North, in that white, silent and deserted expanse. This had reminded Aunt Tilda of her dialogue with Joseph at the Patisserie Lebon. That night she had browsed the book trying to pick out the hidden images among its pages. She had perused it like a stranger breaking into a house, trying not to make a noise for fear of waking the inhabitants. She had stopped at certain places hoping to come across Joseph. She had closed her eyes trying to visualize those people heading for the horizon of that godforsaken realm. When she had finished reading, the first rays of the morning were filtering into the drawing-room. She suddenly realized that the armchair in which she was sitting was the very armchair Joseph had been sitting in. The hours were the same, the voices and sounds were the same for those who could not have had proper access; and the disconnectedness was the same for those whose station at the window never changed. Aunt Tilda was swamped by a sense of desolation, a sense of desertion that she could describe only to those who had already had a similar experience . . .It was a morning in the month of July and a light breeze was wafting in from the sea. She seemed to have heard the hooting of a steamboat. Who, she wondered, would have it in mind to set off on a voyage at such a time? Who were these wandering and shelter-seeking souls that the island embraced? To whom did the smell of the pine trees belong, the lingering warmth of the shoreline on a summer evening, the cats seeking shelter in the streets, the houses that the sea watched over, the language spoken by the orthodox Greek minority, the tables smelling of
anis
? And then . . . and then, for the first time in her life, she felt as if death had touched her. For the first time in her life she felt truly alone; for the first time in her life she began sobbing, remote from whatever had been weighing upon her and the maddening crowd. This was a scene the like of which she had never seen in any movie; a touching scene without an audience . . . She had never seen herself like this, stripped of every garment . . . She had never seen anyone stark naked. Despite all the adventures and love scenes she had seen in films, she had never come so near to that person lost forever in that white expanse. It was a day that had eventually found its audience after many long years. The story had by now assumed a new garb, an emphatic new character that could be conveyed to others and shared by others. Thus, I had opted to remain on this side of the incident. There had been no disagreement as to the cast of characters. I wondered whether everything had been in due order; I’m still at a loss to say anything definite about this. The reason was that something was lurking in the shadows and preoccupying me. Now, what or who was the person Aunt Tilda had shed tears for that morning when she had felt detached from everything? Considering the funereal imagery, could one venture to suggest that she had been mourning for her own death? Could we intimate that our weeping was for our own transience as the participants in the ceremony seemed to suggest? This presumption has found no support thus far. I might just as well retract my steps to the ceremony held at the time as such an attempt seems to waft a scent to where I’m standing now. I don’t know why, but I feel I am supposed to keep silent. I must take into account the fact that no one that I know of has broken with the experience of those mornings as one would have liked to. With reference to her recent past with Joseph, it seems as though Aunt Tilda had also concocted stories; stories of which the leading actress was not herself but others, although she had appropriated those roles herself. She had a tale to which nobody taking a view from outside could have access. The tale had been composed based on illusions and delusions. In it, imagination, viz. the area of defense, had been gradually widened. What she told me during one of our last meetings corroborates this. “Don’t believe what I told you! Most of it was downright lies!” she said that evening. That was another time . . . especially when one considers what I have experienced now compared to what I had experienced then. Whereupon, I had spoken about the need we feel for stories that feed upon lies. I was intending to share this feeling at other places, at other times, and with other people. She had firmly squeezed my hand. She looked despondent, exhausted, and lackadaisical. What was more important still was that she viewed the world with an original discriminating judgment. She believed that she hadn’t deserved to live the days she had been compelled to live. “One can never escape them,” she said, “nor shall one ever be able to.” “Who knows for certain?” I retorted. However, to be honest, I had not grasped exactly what ‘them’ had meant. Did it mean moments, voices, sounds, or visions? I can provide no answer to this question even now. “Perhaps some day,” I say to myself. Some day, perhaps . . . But then, when that day comes, shall I be disposed to disclose ‘them,’ the visions that struck my fancy? I had told Tilda “Who knows for certain?” Both of us were in a position to finish the sentence as it suited us best. A wry smile had appeared on her face. By thinking back on that wry smile, I know today how to find the proper answer to that question.

All of this had been experienced during one of our last meetings. I felt I was being dragged within myself toward voices, looks, and moments I could never get rid of. We had done our best to share our story, our stories, with due patience, while risking getting lost somewhere along the way. All those moments were probably my enigmas which I’d never be able to convey. That evening when we were relishing our fresh rolls purchased from that baker at Kurtuluş, sipping on the light tea we savored while talking about Rita Hayworth, we were so far removed from that great moment of solitude when Aunt Tilda had been abandoned by her husband. Those would be cursed days for both of us.

Sentimental journey

“I’m tired . . . exhausted . . . I’m growing old. The concerts continue to take place but the movie theaters are closing their doors. The movie theaters Gloria, Konak, Elhamra, Alkazar, and Melek are no more, alas, the movie business seems to be at its lowest ebb. Where are those stars now?” Aunt Tilda said after having taken a sip from her cup of tea. I ventured to observe that everybody was still enduring the particular individuals inside them and that they continued to remember and live through their own movies and characters. This was a story lived by innumerable people, with innumerable details in special places and times which would never lose their warmth. This was the reason why we believed, why we wanted to believe, that those visions had entered our lives. It was certainly true that those individuals had got lost somewhere and at times we felt the need to call them back to a new dawn. Nevertheless, as we felt a deep longing for them, we yearned for them in the here and now, to a certain extent, for a part of ourselves no longer alive, for the individual who we believed to be living somewhere inside of us. We were those individuals at that time and space, the individuals whom we wanted to leave in our past for good. We were those people who had been yearning for those individuals who had gotten lost and who had preferred to get lost there. Certain corners, harbors or shores exclusively belonged to particular seasons. Did their reserve imply the seasons that could not be transported to another time, seasons that reanimated our withdrawal within ourselves, that moved us away from each other or off the shores wherein we had enjoyed our marches which we had imposed on our deaths and postponements? This question would bounce back to us more than once when least expected, clad in different covers. The shores were our shores; everybody had his own shore where he sought the warmth of a touch, his own steps that he had not risked to take; steps that he could not take forward, steps that had grown in size just because they had remained confined within him. These steps concealed our history which we desired to recount, to recount at least once in our lifetime, a history we would like to share with somebody. These were solitudes tried and tested, to be consigned to oblivion. However, despite my convictions regarding them, I feel compelled to remind you of this fact—that was a different time. The delusions had a property that linked one to life. We had taken these delusions for granted, without inquiring into them and not caring one whit. I believe that Aunt Tilda was both delighted and displeased with her brother’s return to Istanbul. “Robert is back,” she said, “I’ll tell him to come here; the hotel room must’ve got under his skin.” She made as though she was unaffected by this sudden abandonment, despite the love she had experienced from the relationship. Her giving utterance to her exhaustion, her yearning and recollections for those movies, and her desire to cling to someone, to her elder brother on whose affection she could rely, must have been due to this. Those solitary nights seemed to be more frightful compared to other people’s nights. One should also pay attention to another aspect of the truth. Her wish to see her brother at her place implied the settlement of a long-standing debt she owed to him. When one considers what that return had wrought in that individual who had gone through those experiences, one could not imagine a better arrangement. Let alone being a necessity, it was simply good timing. Aunt Tilda had taken another step toward her family, back toward the days she had missed. London, and the lifestyle that had turned her brother into a hero in her family’s eyes, was now far away, henceforth unattainable, inaccessible, and invisible. The magic had proved to be unsuccessful. The hero was now but an ordinary person, who was made to feel that his presence in a household where he desired to abide forever was unwanted. An ordinary individual doomed to carry the burden of his faults on his own shoulders, like a stranger. No doubt it had occurred to him to ask a question to someone that many would have liked to ask during those days. In other words, whose outstanding debt was he expected to settle? Who attempted to get what during those evenings in which proper room was made for that return? “What have you done so far in your life?” Monsieur Jacques asked his unexpected visitor. His voice seemed to display indignation, reproach, and a tinge of superiority. Monsieur Robert had appreciated what lay behind that question. After all those skirmishes, to guess the meaning of certain words was not so difficult. Guided by the light of this call, complying with the directives of other actors, in spite of other scenes he should act accordingly. He was certainly not a stranger to playing such a role. That is why he said: “Mere ostentation” with a husky voice, without trying to clear his throat beforehand, “Mere ostentation!” It was a Sunday evening, a Sunday evening when rooms seemed to dwindle, to be getting colder, and devoid of veneer. One of the fragments that memory roused in me had found its pertinent place on that Sunday evening . . . Until recently, the lights were those of another city. The stage was also different; a stage which covered up delusions, lies, and distances. He had tried to find himself once more in those visions. Not to sever his ties with that life, but to acknowledge and prove to himself that he was resolved to prolong his age-old habits. He had put on his cashmere sweater that had been a wedding present—which he had made a point of preserving intact up until recently, and which he intended to leave in London when the time came—and left to keep his rendezvous with the five o’clock tea service at the Grosvenor Hotel. He spent that Sunday evening there all alone. The rooms seemed to have diminished; their lights had lost their luster in that Istanbul evening and were occupied by other people. To have been obliged to cast a glance from such a vantage point fascinated the man as if a magic spell had been cast on him that was difficult to describe. However, what was difficult to bear was the transformation of those people that one had known, and would have liked to regard as, one’s next-of-kin, into strangers. “Ostentation! Mere ostentation!” This was a sentence that those who happened to be there, and who had insidiously envied him during the good old days would have liked to hear. The price had been paid. Those who had been on the other side of the boundary line had seen what they wanted to see. Those who were on the other side certainly had their own shores and an area beyond which one could outline and guard. The fact that our cities gained meaning with the city walls within us had already been given utterance by other individuals at other times. The stories in which those boundaries had been mere quirks of fate were waiting to be put into new words for this very reason. Aunt Tilda was not one of the heroes, she should not figure in this story. Her boundary line I had to seek among the fragments that had remained lost to others. This remoteness acted as a badge of intimacy with those who were kept at arm’s length like her elder brother . . . a film star that embodied certain sentiments and was capable of conveying them to his fellow beings. A hero who had his own theme song like all other heroes, a figure of fantasy, but one who appeared to be all too real, relating to, based on, or concerned with objectively existent things in the physical world. The film star in question was Clark Gable, who she wished to see only for herself, and whose smile would abide forever; a Clark Gable, who she expected to tell her that those films were not simple fictional realities. This fantasy, like all similar wild dreams, brought with it transports of delight, a fantasy that had to entrench itself as a sanctuary. However, in this relationship, if certain inevitable boundaries were to be forced, certain concealed sentiments might have to be traced on a completely different
course in a totally different story. Do you think that in tracing this sentiment one could detect an indefinable profound relationship whose characteristics one preferred to keep undisclosed? In the face of our observations and the available clues and implications, our access to such data was beyond possibility, at least for the moment. What remained behind were but the visions of a silent past, incapable of impairing this relationship. The said past intercepted postcards mailed from distant cities and unexpected telephone calls, decoding their encryptions. Aunt Tilda retained the memory of the small money orders her brother had sent through banks with which he performed lucrative business transactions whenever she was short of money, as though they had been very close, as well as of that memorable London visit during which a privately hired Rolls Royce with a private driver had been put to her disposal, of the music halls and operas, of the shopping at Harrods, the Queen’s shopping center, where she had tried on ancient costumes, fashionable hairpieces, and, last but not least, of the restaurant where waiters “as refined as lords” had served her. It was an old film for which she could find no designation and was reluctant to find any name for. An ever-fresh, old film that never lost its authenticity, a film, every frame of which she lived to the core in all its colors, a film to remain stamped on her memory. She had literally run into David Niven on the bend of a street; something had driven her to knock on the door of Mr. Higgins in
My Fair Lady
; when she had posed for a snapshot at the gate of Buckingham Palace next to the royal guard she had felt that she was actually in a land of fairy tales, it never occurring to her that other individuals might also have their own dreamworld, a sanctuary for those who felt out of sorts in their humdrum daily life. In such a distant realm, she unconsciously perpetuated a fate, an attitude to life that directed her course of living. That might have been the reason why she had set too high a value on certain representations more than any ordinary individual. She distinctly remembered that through the window of the five star hotel where she had stayed, she had observed that the car hired by her elder brother used to arrive exactly ten minutes before its appointed time. The driver parked it and glanced at his watch, reporting at a regularly predictable time schedule without any unexpected deviation—typical British punctuality. The whole week she had been in a dreamworld; it was a week destined to remain stored in her memory for the rest of her life. Under the circumstances, she could not possibly have known that her elder brother had been immersed in a quagmire of debt and that he had serious marital problems. Behind that radiant world, there lay concealed quite different solitude and decline. Nobody expected to experience the consequences of a wrong step. It was a time when fantasies had not yet been frustrated or shattered, when belief still persisted in offering a beacon of hope despite setbacks and obligatory detachments. Her elder brother had gained her affections even more so after she was informed of this fact. She had found the opportunity to express this deep-rooted sentiment which had evolved and silently expanded within her as the years went by, which she had tried to enliven somewhere outside the reach of strangers. She was resolved to invite him to her house. She had a modest income, a recurrent revenue from the rent of two shops, a family legacy at Mahmutpaşa; the income was low, it was true, but it was better than nothing; a regular monthly allowance according to which she arranged her budget. One of her tenants was an old mender of worn-out fur coats, she was one of his long-standing customers; the other was a seller of clothes whose assets were dwindling. Everybody tried to live up to their own standards after all and carried their burden to the best of their ability. Factually, the brothers and sisters had equal share in the shops. However, an agreement was made for understandable reasons. Regardless of all contingencies, the shops were to remain and should remain in Tilda’s possession. This bequest of Madame Roza, who had in the prime of her life taken charge as the matron of the entire family, had, to the best of my knowledge, been the consequence of a will secretly drawn up by Monsieur Jacques shortly before his death. A word given or taken under such a circumstance has sometimes greater validity than a piece of written evidence. What interested me in particular at the time, was, I believe, not that secret contract liable to varying interpretations, but rather Aunt Tilda’s capital gain from the lease she took out on the shops. Had she so willed, she might have indulged in a more commercially lucrative venture. As a matter of fact, Monsieur Jacques had taken her to task more than once for failing to take such a step. Yet, I gather that such a preference had given rise to another sentiment; a sentiment devoid of all possible associations, but capable of stirring certain feelings dormant in certain people who prefer to turn a deaf ear to them; a sentiment likely to find echoes somewhere; a sentiment which was the result of an empathy even though the people were far apart, between her and the tenants of those shops trying to put up a bold front against the hardships of life. The income was modest enough, but there were other gains involved. Aunt Tilda must have felt it when she invited her elder brother. The rent she received would be enough to cover her running expenses, including incidentals like movie tickets, concerts, etc. There was nothing else she desired anyhow. However, something new had emerged that would shatter the family to its very foundations. Madame Roza, the woman who had been trying to keep the family members closely linked together, who knit friendships and who knew how to keep secrets, was fated to recede gradually from the individuals to whom she had held out a helping hand in their difficult times.