Istanbul Was a Fairy Tale (72 page)

Starting a new day feeling fresh and vigorous was something excellent of course, although this experience was somewhat related to ‘buying fish’ or ‘going to buy fish’; yet, what was of special significance, which deserved to be dwelt upon, was to go and see Madame Angela rather than buying fish. Enrico was heading for a new story, a story that had to be lived. The story was inviting its old heroes and heroines that actually seemed to have disappeared for the sake of those who had been abandoned during those moments of separation.

Madame Angela was a buxom Mediterranean lady with wide hips and dark eyes, whose gestures gave rise to guffaws when she felt in the mood, a woman who never failed to make a jocular remark to passers-by and whose repartees to people came across as improper innuendoes that were always marked by a saucy freedom and forwardness. She was notorious in the market for her emotional maladjustment to her surroundings and as a person who set about howling over something on the slightest provocation, much as she was skillful, helpful, and of generous temperament. These characteristics of hers had made her a person that everybody loved and respected; a behavior mixed with some diffidence. Different lineaments had been drawn through the encouragement one received from different sources. These experiences were the fragments of different pasts, pasts difficult to relate. But her feelings about Enrico Weizman gained substance when they were shared. These feelings found their meaning through mutual resemblances, common roots, through feelings she tried to keep distant from others. I could understand these feelings. I could understand the reason why his experiences, his losses, and the gains he had made from these losses, the fact that they originated from a past capable of empathizing with other lives lived elsewhere, had drawn them to each other. In the context of these pasts, they seemed to have been drawn to one another. Their spouses had died in the war; both could be said to be strangers to France; both had communist traditions behind them. Her family had emigrated from Naples to Marseilles when Angela was but a young girl. Years, loves, and escapes had finally brought her to this coastal town on the Atlantic Ocean. She had gotten married to the man of her dreams in this town. She had learned to live by a new language. However, all these things had taken place before the war, before she had lost all her relatives. The paths of Enrico Weizman and herself had converged in this town and were destined to share a common fate. They had no other choice. To start a new day with a hearty “hello!” was easy for them. To know how to live—nurturing frail hopes in the face of constant change, wearisome routine, and strings of empty platitudes—called for a certain skill after all. Their topics of conversation were usually the happenings within the body of the party, the articles in
L’Humanité
, fish, and their reflections on the market people. Angela stubbornly believed that her husband had not been killed in the war; she said he had fled the camps and stayed in the country of his comrades. She was almost sure that he had started a new life there. He might pop up at any moment. On the other hand, despite all her expectations and anticipations, she was aware of the fact that she did not and could not love the man she had once believed she could not do without. The war had ended four years ago. The losses and the deaths had corroded the romantic side of her. What was important now was to be able to carry on with the job at hand and look forward. She hadn’t had great difficulty in managing her affairs. In other words, she had successfully met the challenge of the ‘period of transition’ thanks to her past experiences and know-how.

It is reported that Enrico Weizman had mentioned Madame Angela during a ‘human mission’ to Istanbul while telling of his most important encounters. The eyes of Berti, who told me about this woman years later, toward which nobody could remain impassive, betrayed the pride of being trusted with a secret and were mixed with a sadness I could not account for. A time would come when she would occupy a special place in Enrico Weizman’s life as a woman about whom he would be inclined to give a more elaborate account when reverting to his recollections. Berti was one of those who had experienced bitter relationships that could not be put into words or shared. I liked him for this particularity. I too wanted to live, taste, and learn how to experience the bitterness caused by inexpressible relationships in situations where I thought that such affiliations would be never-ending, in the proper sense of the word. The source of the grievance lay, I think, in the impossibility of explaining what ought to be explained to the right people. Those people were sometimes unconsciously the heroes of those relationships, as well as their onlookers who took notice of the real meaning behind the stories. There were situations in which time was lived the wrong way . . . situations wasted in the wrong hands, lingering hopes deferrable because of apprehensions . . . The emotion that different words had raised in Berti might have been due to an affect generated by a similar situation. However, in order that I might be able to decipher certain details and measure their proper significance, I needed to gauge this effect better, and to learn how to be patient once more. Those stories, like those people, stood there even though they were not lived as they ought to have been, waiting for their ‘real’ time to come. “That woman was no ordinary woman. I had felt this, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask what I really wanted to ask. A hand, an invisible hand seemed to have forestalled my action . . . ” Berti said. What was meant by this was that gap, that sense of imperfection generated by my inability to have access to that untouchable and forbidden zone. One may prefer not to soil, with one’s foreign steps, the path leading to that zone in the face of people whom one reveres. This experience seems to refer to a period of hesitancy that looks as though it will never end; an old period of hesitancy that looks as though it
has
no end; a period of hesitancy that holds you immobile, unable to decide which action to take, about whether you should take that step forward or not; its real meaning lies in your past, in another human being to whom you cannot have access. I might well understand this hesitancy. However, when I go over Enrico Weizman’s experiences, his attitude toward life, it occurs to me that this concern must be concealing quite another concern lying in the depths of the water.

Enrico Weizman with whom I had lunch at Rumelikavağı was a man who tried to make the best out of every situation he found himself in, who, every now and then, laughed, sometimes without rhyme or reason, who spoke about death as though he was delivering a speech on a meteorological forecast and who recounted assiduously his recollections to anybody willing to listen, anyone without the least moral scruple, save for those he had left behind in the years gone by. Berti and Juliet were also at the table. He had returned to Istanbul, in his own words, as someone who had the “identity of an immigrant who had lost his enthusiasm.” This was a somewhat belated and inadequate visit. He knew that I had been working on a very long story. Now and then, it occurs to me that he had provoked in me that moral scruple on purpose. I owed that evening to Juliet who had mentioned the dream I held before dinner. We had had a long talk, setting out from the night in question and making headway toward the war, toward the days of old, toward escape and return. Fragments were getting fitted together. This was an encounter, an extraordinary meeting I yearned for for ages.

True encounters called people to special venues. The moments spent during such encounters were at the same time the most important moments in which you took progressive steps, steps which you believed to be exceptional. What we had discussed that evening at the restaurant would resurrect that sensation in me. On his way to see that fisherwoman, the experience Enrico Weizman had during that encounter, brought time to a standstill. At the least expected moment, the flow of daily events diverted their course in a completely different direction, transforming and affecting many lives. The transformation had occurred in one single moment; it was a moment that opened a new darkness within me. I was to open the door cautiously, full of apprehension. The man toward whom the actors of that meeting made headway was a person who had become the figure in quite a different dream, in quite a different wasteland. Whose future was it then? For whose sake and on whose behalf was one to appropriate those indelible visions of that morning lost in the hazes of war? At that moment and because of that moment a French woman had approached him, whose acquaintance he thought he ought to make, a talkative woman, a woman who seemed not to have lingered long at school desks and who was hardly interested in reading, a woman who freely expressed her philosophical ideas whenever the occasion allowed. She had stopped and asked him if he was Monsieur Weizman, by any chance. She shouldn’t be reproached for her daring, since the war had changed everybody. He had observed in that woman, who had achieved mastery in making the best of a bad situation with a hot baguette, a few slices of ham, and a few drops of wine, during the intervals between love-making in order to fill the gap caused by penury; to compensate for a lack of affection, a woman who could not help exteriorizing the effects of this mastery through nervous gestures, with her untimely wrinkles and gesticulations and jargon which might be interpreted as audacious by some. It seemed to him like
déjà-vu
, a moment which had been the subject of many an anecdote, experienced by nearly everybody and often recounted. A person comes from afar, from a distant past, a figure lost in the mists of the past, a person whom you have totally forgotten . . . and you feel a certain touch; a small touch, like in poems, between brackets. Then . . . then it becomes a chip on your shoulder you can never bring yourself to share with others. A pain you would prefer to get rid of. Why did he have to think like that? To protect himself? Maybe. He had told her that he was indeed Monsieur Weizman. The woman had introduced herself with a tremulous voice without trying to disguise her joy. She was Claudine Manzil, the concierge of the apartment that Nesim and Rachael had lived in once upon a time. It was my turn now to get excited. My excitement was due to the potential information that this woman could provide me with. Madame Manzil asked me about Nesim, Rachael, and the children. When all her questions had been answered, she grew silent and said that Ginette was alive and working in a monastery nearby. The incidents at the Bayonne Prison and the words that Rachael had said to Nesim while she held him tight had surged up in his vision. They had not merely embraced each other, it was a gesture of hope, a last hope . . . He had said that they had to go and sit down in a café and talk. They were living a story they could not abandon halfway through as they would have to carry it to the bitter end. Madame Angela had understood and tried to turn a deaf ear to their conversation. Madame Manzil went on relating the rest of the story with bated breath and great enthusiasm. The intonation of her voice, her looks, and the person that she tried to speak of denoted her preparations for this anticipated moment. “To withstand the Gestapo’s oppression was impossible, Monsieur. My husband kept on saying that if ever we were caught we would all be done for. We were terrorized.” She seemed to remember all the details of the incidents they had witnessed in their small apartment. The dress she wore might well have dated from that period. The war seemed to continue for certain people and showed no signs of ending soon. I had to remain silent and listen. “But there was a human being I had been entrusted with and had to protect. There was a life to be rescued, Monsieur! Not merely because I had given my word to Madame Rachael; but because it was my duty first and foremost. I thought that the best thing to do would be to take this poor girl to the convent where my mother and I often visited. The convent in question was a place I felt attracted to. I had gone there even after my wedding. I also took my own children there. I found peace there; I prayed for long hours and communed with myself. I wasn’t in a position to guess what Ginette might end up having to face there with the nuns. Poor Madame Rachael! May she rest in peace! I know she would forgive me having done this for the good of her daughter. I was sure Ginette would find safety there. It was long after I visited the place, in accordance with the stipulation of the nuns. She would grow up there in the midst of a single united family. But I couldn’t control my need to see her. So, I went to visit. I had seen Madame Rachael in my dreams. She said to me with the usual smile on her face that she missed Ginette and asked me whether I was taking good care of her. She looked downcast. She said she couldn’t come from where she was. When I awoke, the dawn had not yet broken. I waited impatiently for the first rays of sunshine before setting out. First, I had had a talk with Marie-Thérese, the prioress. She had grown old. She addressed me as ‘my little girl’ like in the old days. She appeared not to believe that I had become an adult like her many other ‘little girls.’ Well, the war had matured us before our time. She might also have wished to instill in me the peace I had lost elsewhere. I think I’m beginning to ramble. Had my husband been here now he would have said: ‘Come on, say what you want to say outright, without having to revert to roundabout expressions, Claudine!’ Excuse me, Sir. All I want to communicate to you is what I’ve experienced. Marie-Thérese did not want me to see Ginette. She said I could have a glimpse of her from a distance. I had no other choice. I had confidence in her. I revered her, had affection for her. I believe she was right. She had glanced at her watch. The hour of service was drawing near. Ginette was soon to pass before us in file with the other nuns. She held me by the hand. We walked through the corridor and hid ourselves from view in a dark corner. They passed before us in formation. I immediately recognized her. She had grown up and changed considerably; but, this did not prevent me from recognizing her. She had the air of Rachael. She shot a glance in our direction which made me shiver, although she could not see us. She must have felt my presence. She looked beautiful; her face had an expression of absolute serenity. Marie-Therese told me that she was loved by everyone in the monastery. She told me she kept asking about her parents, about their whereabouts, and the reason they had deserted her.