Istanbul Was a Fairy Tale (59 page)

rt’s content. Nora’s journey there was not merely in order to discover her voice. I was going to see in all its nakedness the realities of this, there was no escape from it. It was evening and we had gone to our café at Bebek to have a cup of sage tea; it was there we had tasted it for the first time . . . As we were gazing at the yachts anchored along the edge of the Bosporus, she had said something about the invitation of a picture. I had said nothing in return. I couldn’t bring myself to say anything. This had marked the end of a long relationship; it would take quite a long time before we would see each other again. Having said goodbye to our café, we had walked hand in hand to Aşiyan. On our way, as we were passing by Bebek bay, I had reminded her of the paddle boat we had hired once to go angling. She had put her arms around me and said: “Please forgive me . . . I know it’s not so easy. But try to forgive me.” That was the moment she had truly yielded herself to me. That was the last time we had been together. Nora was not even twenty at that stage.

I could never fix a place for Nora, the Nora of my imagination, in the story she preferred to be heading toward. Actually, the most important reason for my desire to play a little trick from the place in which I was peeping at her was because of this lack of acknowledgement. This was the trick of an urchin who tried to suppress his resentment. An urchin feeling lonely once more. His favorite toy which he would not part with and had once again been snatched away from his grasp. He would not be able to complain to anyone when he went home. According to my will, in this play Nora would have to be the heroine of a story hardly fitting her and in which she would never feel comfortable. There was no other way for me to carry her in the course of those days when I felt distant from her. That was the only way I could hold her within the limited space of a few words and sentences. I had been lured once more by the attraction of covering distances within the sphere of a lie that nobody suspected me of. This was a method I’d already used, a method that had aroused confidence in me once again in the day about to break. In this contemplated story, Nora, having let herself be swept by the pathos of a soul in mutiny and who had lived with somebody somewhere for a time, would finally realize her error, recognize the limits of her boundaries, and taking full cognizance of her incapacity to proceed on, would go back to her family in the hope of clinging even more firmly to the fragments of the life she had dispensed with to the extent they were still attainable. Knowing full well that this was an unconditional surrender, and, with a view to convincing those she had left behind of that fact, she would marry a yuppie, an owner of a large plastics factory who during his leisure hours did nothing else other than dilly-dally on his PC, who had not developed the habit of reading and who purchased stereo sets for the mere sake of showing off the technical accoutrements in his possession, being utterly devoid of any musical or cultural background, a man who was a connoisseur of well-known brands, who took special pleasure in displaying his
Mont Blanc
fountain pen and
Davidoff
cigars, who frequented the stylish restaurants for the mere sake of their names and whose hobbies were skiing, motorcycling, and reckless driving. I would ask her a couple of days prior to the wedding how come she had decided to marry such a man. She would incline her head toward her chest and say: “I’m looking for peace.” As a topic of discussion I might opt for the café at Bebek. Then, we would come to a stop. We would play hide and seek and make as if we had turned a blind eye to each other. This play would go on for years on end. Based on the words she had uttered while we were at the café and during our encounters, I would conclude that she was implying certain things she had wished to convey to me. At that moment I would call to mind the preferences of other men in other worlds. In one of those stories I remember having mislaid a fragment which kept recurring in my mind; a fragment of mine ever appearing . . . Despite all that we had gone through and the moments and contingencies that were waiting to be reproduced over and over again, I would be seated at a place in the synagogue in her field of vision. During the service, our eyes would meet quite casually. I would smile. That moment would be a decisive moment for me in which a victory would be won, a little victory I had been waiting for with great patience. I would be among the last guests to congratulate her on her marriage. I would try to express my pleasure in the victory I had achieved in a manner she would understand while shaking her hand. Her hand would squeeze mine as though she would not let it go, to confirm the impression I had tried to convey to her. We would be conscious of the fact that she had taken a wrong path. The said path would then be simultaneously noticed by both of us. We would then seek to clasp our hands, a gesture in which we both would have absolute confidence. This would be the last scene of the story. However, before long I would realize that the person who had been treading that path was no other but myself and that I could find no one, including myself, gullible enough to believe in the truth of this story despite the literary style and rhetoric I had adopted. Nora once again had stood up against me and proved that she was capable of demolishing that wall. These scenes of ritual were from another story, a story whose heroes and heroines were elsewhere and were to stay elsewhere. When I go back to the past and delve into my memories, this probability reminds me of Rosy, Nora’s poor elder sister, that submissive, benevolent and introverted “lady spinster” as she had been referred to by people at the time. Her own way to marriage and her behavior during the wedding ceremony would be abnormal. I would notice her because of her reaction upon learning that Aunt Tilda had not been invited to the sumptuous banquet given at that restaurant in Tarabya. The Neve Synagogue was overcrowded that day. Every one of the guests was supposed to wear a beatific smile in token of his or her contribution to the general mirth. Every one of the guests was supposed to make a proof of their emotion commensurate with their age, just like at all wedding ceremonies. I’m sure that Monsieur Jacques would have felt the absence of a few members of the family in the distant lands beyond his reach. Berti seemed agitated; his lips were trembling. It was his habit; his lips trembled when he felt restless and worried. His son-in-law had failed to endear himself to him. One day, during the wedding preparations, he had made the following observation concerning this ‘new guest’ whose entrances to the house had become more and more frequent: “The guy has something I can’t put my finger on that displeases me,” but added at the same time that such a funny feeling on the part of the father of the bride should be a natural phenomenon. Like all the other family members, he knew well that he had to put up with such ingresses. Juliet had begun sprucing up; however, I do not feel inclined to make any further observations regarding her in relation to that day. Nora was staring at her elder sister affectionately. Her stare occasionally diverted from the object of her attention. It was as though this movement was the indication of a break, of an unavoidable break. I would have an insight into the meaning of this break much later while experiencing separation. It may be that Nora had a presentiment about her fate. On that day, most of those present could feel her absence, betraying their smiles in the photographs. These made a history of endearing words, of silent betrayals remaining concealed forever, of unsettled debts, of fronts hiding certain sorrows, and of lives postponed. The crowd had not dispersed. The rejoicings, the rejoicings that did justice to the occasion were there. Nobody, no one among the guests could have guesed that they would be visiting the synagogue about five years later, this time for Rosy; yet, Rosy had taken a fancy to Nedim who had put in a dramatic appearance in the life of the Venturas during some dark spots in his past. There was more than one reason for her choice of Nedim as her husband. On the other hand, Nedim, in his turn, seemed to have found the woman of his dreams. Everything seemed alright, in other words; for many, their relationship seemed to lead to the home one should long for and kindle in one’s imagination. They were comfortably settled in a spacious and luxurious apartment in Erenköy. It was one of those high-rise apartments which had nothing original about it except for its being devoid of all traits and qualities distinguishing individuality. The dwellers of this apartment might well be surrogates from any class of society. This was the result of contemporary mass production. To describe them you needed to have recourse to a few sentences which are patent lies but with which everybody is familiar and which are expected to be uttered all the same. What a fine apartment you have! Gorgeous, isn’t it! However, what one requires in the first place is peace of mind. Missing things can be bought in time, there’s no hurry! Isn’t it nicer to purchase things gradually? I seem to remember it better now. It was a Saturday night. I had gone to Erenköy to pay a visit to their new home. It had never been my custom to pay such a visit. But frankly, Rosy had aroused considerable sympathy in me after that wedding. I think I wanted to give expression to that feeling of regret that remoteness had aroused in me. I had made her a gift of a silver picture-frame. I know that this present had no originality, or any value for that matter. But if one retraced our past it seemed to fit in with our existing routine. This had been a token of my crystallized emotion. Moreover, I had attached a special meaning to it. We had been seeking new ways of thinking in order that we could rely more firmly on our doubts, on our little deceptions, on ourselves . . . Rosy was surprised that my visit brought a gift; her bewilderment had suddenly transformed her into a childish woman. To have been a contributing factor to a little delight had made a place for me in that house, a place I could never forget. “I brought this to you so that you may place in it all the people we have abandoned to their fates,” I said as I gave the picture frame to her. The meaning was implied in that encrypted phrase. I’d aimed at arriving on stage through these words. She had understood the drift of this. I noticed some tears in her eyes. This was my second moment of togetherness with her. She had thanked me with a tremulous voice and said: “It will stay in my safekeeping forever.”

This was how my penetration into the house had been effected. The rest does not deserve to be narrated in detail. We had dinner, drank, listened to music, and discussed truisms. Nedim had spoken of the
Lamborghini
of his dreams, of Japan, of elegant restaurants in Istanbul likely to fascinate gourmands. All that had been discussed might be judged entertaining if the atmosphere of that evening and the man I wanted to figure in that atmosphere are considered. I knew where all these talks would lead. I hadn’t found it difficult to discover the characteristics of Rosy’s ‘man of her dreams.’ This seemed to be one of the other facets of culture. It might come to the rescue of a person in the least expected moment, which might contribute to the opening of new avenues. Notwithstanding, I believe I had been able to perceive Nedim’s imperceptible merits that lay in his depths. What exactly was lying in those depths? It occurred to me that it might have something to do with his relations with that Japanese woman, or to be more precise, what we had been told about them in general. Rumors circulated that had been given credence by many people. I might well have remained under their influence. There was no doubt that the mentioning of Japan as a country deserving to be known, understood, and experienced, which seemed to have been casually referred to
en passant
, was significant. It had aroused in me a sense of doubt. I was familiar with this doubt. I would never betray the grooves that that doubt had carved within me. I was a slave to those stories. I had the opportunity to see Rosy once again at a time when I, couched in reticence, made as if I were listening to what was being narrated about Nedim’s private world, in the belief that he was sharing some of its aspects with me. He also made as if he were listening to what was being told. He was seated close by, but his stare was fixed on a certain spot, which gave the impression that he was lost in the distance. He kept fidgeting with the tassels of the armchair in which he was seated. He chain-smoked and extinguished his cigarettes before they ended. Every now and then he sallied to the kitchen to empty the ashtrays. He seemed to be seeking a sort of hold in that house. That was my point of view, which might be wrong of course. We felt ourselves in different times, every one of us. Once our eyes met; I had the impression that he was being caught in the act. Had my impression been true, what sort of a crime could he have committed, I wondered. Could ‘deafness’ be considered a crime, a murder? Were such criminal acts perpetrated solely in those prohibited zones? I am certain I’ll be evading such questions, interminably, for years to come. This evasion will remind me of a betrayal whose burden I shall have to carry to the bitter end. I know that in order to be able to take a few steps forward, to be able to get into a few individuals, one should not be bothered or at least act as such. That was our third meeting since our adventure on that wedding night, since that event we had all shared. Rosy had expressed herself in this fashion, as she was incapable of doing it in any other way; which suited the impression she had of me, or wanted to have of me; by clinging to that fragile thing to the bitter end, as long as her strength allowed; hoping to smother that scream in her depths. It’s a pity that I can see all these things from my actual vantage point. To move away . . . It appears that I had to move away in order to better understand things from a distance. The funny thing was that as one moved away one inevitably drew nearer. Under the circumstances, I feel better now that I can follow the train of thought related to the happenings of that night and of the following nights . . . Rosy had preferred to give utterance to what she intended to say at close quarters. There was a place to which she felt she did not belong. It appeared that she had already felt before that the place where she had been obliged to live did not belong to her. One was witness to the case of a woman who had failed to obliterate her extraneousness in a story. Beyond that remained that boundary we failed to define. We were to meet twice in different venues after that evening. However, our discourse had come to an end in that house, with that look. I believe we were cognizant of this fact. Our distances and boundaries dragged us elsewhere. Among that crowd of people, we were to figure no more. I didn’t know what the matter was. To be able to know the answer to this question and the consequences that it gave rise to, I would have to wait for many years. All I knew was that the long silence had been desired to be perpetuated. Everybody felt it necessary to hold onto that long silence according to their own quirks, for their own sake. This may have been the reason why that question had never been asked by those spectators. It was incumbent upon one to contribute to become attuned to the setting of the play being enacted so as to figure in it and be one of the players called upon to act. On weekends well-known restaurants and nightclubs were frequented and package tours were embarked upon. A girl was born to the family in the second year of their marriage, a girl to be brought up in the best possible way by the mothers of both parties. In such marriages, families on both sides were often engaged. There were times when real feelings and sentiments disappeared; people desired to see them disappear somewhere in their line of vision. Those times had to be lived. Everybody lived those times for the adventure latent in one’s heart. To my mind, the tragic element in the story of Rosy was concealed in this vision. The vision in question was in part our own image; that image in which she was hidden and had to hide herself. It was about this time, one morning three years after the birth of her daughter that the world, the world as we knew it, would appear to Rosy’s eyes for the last time, for she was to lose her balance while wiping the window panes on the eighth floor of her building and fall down, down into her last void. An aura of mystery had surrounded the incident that had occurred there at quite an unexpected moment. Questions, probing questions would be asked once again by individuals despite communal interests and the union of both families. Were the lives of certain people to continue to be hushed and hackneyed despite all expectations, postponements, betrayals, and lies? Sometimes a given moment, a sentence, or a few words sufficed to end a life. A single moment, a single step was all it took to put an end to a life. The incident had shattered everybody; the family was most affected because they were unprepared. To be caught unawares was a grim fate certainly. To believe in fortuitous events was another way of enduring the suffering. However, everybody was aware of the fact that that moment and that step were the natural consequence of a bitter prelude, as anyone who had had introspective experience would readily acknowledge. This inner voice may have been the reason for the crowded attendance at the funeral. Among the attendees were not only relatives, friends, and people who sincerely desired to share the pain, but also certain individuals who had not been seen for years. In other words, in addition to the close friends, those present were the belated, the remorseful, and the mere spectators. Condolences were expressed to Juliet and Berti. Juliet had hardly spoken a word. I had accosted her with some apprehension, as though I happened to be an accomplice of the crime. I always felt culpable at such unexpected deaths, a psychology difficult to describe. We were locked in a passionate embrace. “She is now somewhere else, in a place she had always wanted to be. I’m sure that she is very happy, far happier than she would have been among us. I know we’ll see her no more, this is a fact. We cannot prove the correctness of our feelings because we have no evidence. Yet, we must trust in our intuition and lend an ear to our inner voice. You should know that she would have liked us to believe that the place where she has gone is far more fascinating than the place she has left behind. The blue horizon beyond belongs to us who knew how to love her truly. There is no other beyond. We mustn’t rely on any other beyond,” I said. Juliet had been nodding yes. She had squeezed my arm and not uttered a word. It appeared that she preferred to keep silent, to contain her voice within herself, and not let it be heard by others. Were she to talk, were she to hear that voice, she would surely be sobbing wildly. However, there would be other hours for weeping to the point of being oblivious of everything. Those were the hours when other people had become dream figures, the hours when an unexpected visitor would be tapping on the windowpane of the room, the hours when an object reminded one of its songs and when a place communed with itself . . . Those hours were the hours that matured within us. We were aware of this. I believe we knew and had sensed that we would be experiencing this recycling more than once; we knew that we would be sharing this. As she had to receive courtesy visits while seated silently on her couch dressed in black, gazing at the cotton wick dipped in olive oil contained in a glass bowl, she had appeared to me as though she were waiting for other visitors. Once again we were together. Once again . . . in a way nobody could fathom, one that we could not des
cribe to anyone. I caught sight of Berti; he was smiling. It looked as though what I had said and tried to convey had aroused some joy in him. He seemed to say that this too would pass. Some people solemnly moved by winding their way through the alleys of our soul to the accompaniment of their voices. Some people marched on to the places beyond on our behalf. We were obliged to believe in this presentiment. We had to convince ourselves of the fact that we could walk away from the things we would be able to recall, far removed from those places that contained them; heading for other places. We would be treading new paths. Actually, we had known each other during those strolls; it had been our intention to speak to each other about them. He was silent. “You’re welcome to our club,” he said. “Welcome to our club,” that was all. Our conversation had been concluded by these few words. Yet, for those who knew our shared past, these few words were already too many. Nora was also there, naturally. She had come over to Istanbul as soon as she had heard the news of her elder sister’s death. Was she also one of the belated? Was she also among those who had heard the voice of regret within herself with reference to the days she would no longer be able to touch, the voice to describe to someone the lingering images of that chamber? Well, I don’t think I’ll be ever able to know. However, the very act of putting forth those questions, the fact that I felt obliged to ask them, signifies that I wanted to see her at the time. This conviction of mine is corroborated by the fact that she, after the end of the seven day mourning period, had decided to leave Istanbul by taking off the dark costume she had been wearing and to leave for where she knew she could find no one to share the burden of the days she had lived. To depart within such a brief period of time, following the traditional seven day mourning, meant for me an escape from something, from something hardly definable by everyday vocabulary. This escape connoted escape from that story, from our story. That was a different time; we had to put off making other mistakes for the time being. An exchange of looks between us had served because of this, perhaps. It is true that we looked at each other, and had remained contented. We felt obliged to remain pent up within our solitudes, within our words. Other people were but our shadows once more. They kept us within themselves. To remain attached to this feeling during those days, to be aware of our attachment to it, had aroused in me a fresh hope. Our story was pregnant with another. To entertain such a hope had given rise to a feeling in me I would describe as a wry joy, which I would be in a better position to define with time.