Istanbul Was a Fairy Tale (9 page)

Details of a long walk that lent meaning to the word fate, much different from the widely accepted definition . . . Uncle Kirkor certainly had his own interpretation of his shop with every passing day as a home in which the role played by fate should not be overlooked . . . Life was a path that had to be trodden, or an interminable play that one could not share with others: a play like the one featuring Ani and himself, in which everybody had become familiarized with their role, despite their resistance and expectancies, and eventually it obliged them to go along with it and try to convey it through their delusions. To switch the lights in the shop on and off with certain minute rituals imperceptible to an ordinary onlooker, to have Ismail, the drunkard, grease the shutters of the shop at prescribed intervals, which he meticulously lifted and lowered every evening; to gets bits of profits out of other people’s affairs, hiding in his cache cigarettes that he had stolen from packages lying about, offering them to his guests, as a token of his generosity, shifting the places of fabrics saying that “every fabric has its own season and every season its own place” of which the texture, the weave, the quality he readily identified thanks to his expert knowledge acquired throughout his apprenticeship, as though he wanted to convey the message that seasons influenced individuals’ idiosyncrasies. This act was some sort of a ritual for Uncle Kirkor. I now and then saw him sweep the front of his shop, early in the morning. I used to gaze at him with a smile. He understood me. There were other people who could take care of this, of course. He certainly knew it. However, when I caught him in the act, he had ready clichés to utter in a special broken accent to justify his actions. “After all, it’s our means of existence . . . You must take good care of it and not put it out of sight . . . ” I don’t know why, but this sentence assumed quite a different and deep significance on Uncle Kirkor’s tongue. This was one of the interesting things about that little ritual. Occasionally, we spoke in French. In the rudimentary French of Uncle Kirkor—whose vocabulary hardly exceeded fifty or sixty words. Those were the days of our hijinks. In his vocabulary were also obsolete words dating from the time of his visit to his cousin in Marseilles years ago. Among his recollections of those mornings—of those early mornings—were also the impressions left on him by the visions, voices and scents of the past. Those were our concretely lived mornings. What had been left there were the realities of the places that Uncle Kirkor revived in his imagination. They were the war years that the younger generation would never be able to imagine; those were the times when, despite penury, they had never been short of margarine. I remember the day when the new buses had arrived imported from Sweden. Parsek Dikranyan, their neighbor, a devotee of all things American, had, one day, at midnight, in the company of his wife and daughter, left for New York. According to the accounts that reached us, Parsek, after having engaged in many an uphill struggle, had ended up working as a driver, and, having worked in the profession for many years, died looking back at his days in Istanbul with a certain amount of nostalgia, especially missing the odors that permeated the Spice Market. Nevertheless, rumors were spread to the effect that he had not died a natural death, but had been killed by the dagger of an Italian florist, and that his breathtakingly beautiful daughter, Ida, had become a prostitute. This was one of the stories between Uncle Kirkor and I that had left certain fleeting impressions on me. I think he had been instrumental in contributing to the development of my narrative style and my art of listening. These were my favorite stories, the ones dearest to me. He also reminded me of the cryptic messages that were played by foreign broadcasting stations on the shortwave, transmitted by the French Resistance, after the Ankara radio signed off at eleven o’clock. Among the messages he had especially remembered was one transmitted by the French Resistance Organization: Le cochon est constipé. It was a message he had never been able to decipher, a message whose mysterious meaning preoccupied him until the very end; a message that no longer held any significance. He also remembered listening to the speeches of Général Charles de Gaulle. They got a vicarious thrill from the ongoing events. “They will win . . . Europe will be liberated,” his father had said. Their mother was also with them, she had not yet departed. She used to buy the daily
Le Journal d’Orient
for her husband from the newspaper stand at Tünel. This daily was the last remnant of the dailies published in French in Turkey. It too was coming to an end, almost without anyone noticing. He used to cast a glance at the paper. At times, the friar at the college Saint-Michel was revived in his memory. He also remembered the morning of the horrible devastation caused at Beyoğlu following the September Incidents, when the main streets were littered with the contents of the shops.

Uncle Kirkor was for me a valuable witness and was one of the principal actors in that long story. However, in this story there was another actor that made him a living and unforgettable hero. To understand Uncle Kirkor without having an idea about that actor was impossible. To turn a deaf ear to that actor’s account would be tantamount to listening to Uncle Kirkor with only one ear. It appeared that that actor had encountered Uncle Kirkor for the first time at a very special moment of his solitude that no one had had any inkling of. How otherwise could one play that prank on others?

Niko, the Waistcoat Tailor

I know well enough by now, that, in time, certain words are liable to assume a plurality of meanings. What I don’t know or am not sure about, however, is whether these words eventually hit the mark they aim at in defiance of the meanings involved. Now that I have set out to trace the path that led from Uncle Kirkor to Niko, I feel somewhat hesitant whether I should use a phrase I had been reserving for the story I have not yet penned: they had lived the poem of showing another place to another person . . . When I brood over the story in question, it seems to me that that sentence half-opens the door to another world. All the same, I can’t help asking the question despite this probability. I wonder how many people and how many lives can one person live through in a lifetime? I was to learn, one day, from Olga, during a seemingly casual talk, that the incidents which had occurred on that fatal day at Pera—which was in terminal decline, gradually deteriorating into Beyoğlu—which can also be considered as an extension of that awful awakening that compelled certain people at the least expected moment to depart for places they were reluctant to reach, had created a deep sorrow in Uncle Kirkor, the origin of a growing gap within him. In that story, it seemed as though everybody was trying to tell each other, at an opportune moment, certain things that were banded together. Certain things . . . lurking in the shade, of lasting remembrance, alive, in their own voices, things not consigned to oblivion . . . Just to see to it that those stories are conveyed to posterity, to avoid mass extinction, to secure their permanence in one way or another, in memories . . . “He is after Niko,” Olga said, as if disclosing a secret, with looks expressive of the fact that she had been among the material witnesses to certain situations in the past, on one of those days of Uncle Kirkor’s soul-searching, when he had absconded for a short time from the shop on the pretext that he was going to “drink some soup” while his actual intention was to knock back a raki, to be in pursuit of Niko, of a lost soul, although bereft of hope, not to sink into despair, to shoulder one’s past, as a sense of belonging to some place, to some person . . . Learning this from Olga (a fact that Uncle Kirkor had never mentioned during our morning talks) was for me, to be honest, a source of special grief. Situations revived and reproduced past stories even in their new places, stories that inevitably changed their makeup in someone else . . . What had exasperated me was not his reticence, the sense of alienation which I deemed to be quite natural given our relationship and the age gap between us despite the sympathy we felt toward one other, his preference was to relive the story all alone, in his own depths, far removed from his friends. However, it occurs to me now that in time we had developed a tacit understanding and begun sharing the different memories of Niko within us, as regards minor but important details, without imparting anything of significance to each other. Long after those days, years, very many years later . . . Uncle Kirkor had, I think, understood that I had come to know Niko by inference, by what I could glean from other people’s observations and verses. As a matter of fact, I had tried to intimate this to him. We had spotted each other’s secrecy on an extremely fine line of thought partly because of this. To carry on the story through different paths depended on us. Certain details we deemed important had already found us outside of our brief encounters and short visits. We had our shortcomings and little puzzles. The fact that we had been unable to properly tell each other of the inception and the progress of our stories relating to Niko was most probably due to our recourse to fantasy, just like in the case of many other narrations of ours. I was to experience a like feeling with certain other people who had imparted extremely long stories to me. In conclusion, we have to acknowledge that a great many people live and continue to live like the rest of us. Nevertheless, I think that this part of the story had a special attraction for us. For, we had already grown accustomed to evading certain facts, our facts. Evasions were our evasions, and the borders that we had traced were part of our lives. I could never learn, for this reason, when exactly had this story begun, and in particular, why. All that I know and can say is that Niko, introduced to me as a good drinking companion with whom one could share many a problem and dilemma, had taken part in this story through his identity as a waistcoat tailor carrying on his trade at his workshop on Aşir Efendi street. The workshop in question was a ramshackle construction whose creaking floor reminded one, at every opportunity, of its run-down condition. It had never occurred to Niko to replace the linoleum that bore on it the marks of endless stories, the footprints of a multitude of people, a linoleum, of which the color had faded away and the designs of which were wiped clean, while the torn bits and pieces caused the customers to trip. There was also a cat called Yorgo: a cat that looked as though it had been there since time began. It is said that Niko spoke to him in Greek so that the people present might not understand what he said. However, I never knew who those present were. Who may they have been? Visitors that popped in for various purposes or the customers or the other cats that now and then paid a visit, perhaps? Heaven knows! It’s a bit difficult for me to answer these questions as a hero of another story who had merely been a spectator watching from a distance. However, even though such a question may have been left unanswered, it provides enough clues to enable certain people to easily observe certain aspects of life. That means to go as far as the desired location, following the clues at hand, is again within our reach . . . It is said that Yorgo also relished raki. Niko had made a point of treating his chum with his allotted portion before shutting down the shop. Apparently, the cat knew very well the amount of water that had to be added to dilute the potion; any addition or reduction to his wonted quantity of water was immediately sensed since he refused to drink it. There was another man in the shop acting as assistant to Niko by the name of Şeref from the province of Urfa, a type who was spare with his words. He stammered; a blood feud had paved his way to Istanbul. This rumor could be interpreted differently, of course: was this a search or an attempt at removing one’s roots? Was this a question of a settlement of accounts or an avoidance of a reprisal? Nobody could come to a definitive conclusion. One day, this age-old visitor failed to show up. He had disappeared without giving any notice . . . Had he been disposed of? Was he going to meet his inexorable fate? Nobody knew.

These are the photographs I could gather from the collection, arranged in the order I saw fit, although I’m still at a loss to fix them in their proper places in Niko’s story. It appears that the starting point had been a neighborhood relationship and that the masks—which those who had their parts to play in their respective lives knew very well how to wear—appeared to have been adapted better and better with every passing day. It seemed to indicate that several individuals, after having converged at a crossroads in their lives, had continued to live collectively. After their departure from that crossroads, it seemed that certain photographs thus reflected a collective outlook. Certain photographs were looked at casually, most probably from a communal point of view, by those sharing all the tactile feelings and delusions involved; without them being conscious of where, what and how certain particulars had been appropriated at what level. Masks had been put on, remained unidentified . . . With a view to being able to remain hidden as long as possible among other individuals. As people imbibed their teas, their conversation based on ready-made prescriptions with empty political platitudes hardly involving private interests despite differences of opinion, they proffered immaterial solutions, taking care to pay due attention in order to keep remote from certain things. This was, in a certain sense, the categorical imperative of history; the consequence of a choice related to the sentiment that a particular place imparted to certain people through the inspiration of history. The places in question had either been previously pinpointed or the individuals in question were compelled to choose them for themselves. You might sometimes show reluctance in identifying those places. Football matches had, for a length of time, caused people to forget the worries created by the monotony of life and the inevitable bondage to monetary concerns. In those little worlds, the moments were lived in small steps; the invisible moments of life were spent along with those passing glances. Ears were lent to the elderly people in their identity as aged and were deemed worth listening to, while the young people were presumed to be promising to the extent they abided by social rules. Were they among the voiceless murderers, defenders of the status quo, lost in their little dreams they told no one about? At the time nobody could provide an answer to this question. After all, the world was a place of such sentiments where even pouring out one’s grievances to one’s friends was vented with insipid truisms, with platitudes that conveyed only a couple of unforgotten words, a far cry, reminiscent of a muted call . . . All these things were embodied in the relations that Uncle Kirkor and Niko had got entangled with, for better or for worse. However, in my estimation, barring all these cover-ups and efforts at concealment, they had their own particular stories that were inaccessible and incomprehensible to others. The intelligence I could obtain from different quarters intimated that there was in this a desire to proceed on toward such a story. The story was of two individuals, who had endeavored to act or continued to act, in one way or another, on other people’s stages, being at variance with each other or at least seeming to be at variance with each other; the story of two companions, each in search of a role for themselves that would enable them to carry the burden of those defeats and deceptions believed to be the fate of every mortal. I think these roles were performed as spontaneous acts, acts that might have been slyly masqueraded as self-defense. It seemed that they had performed on that stage their most important and successful roles. According to Olga, who had told me the story of their controversies with her own additions to, and subtractions from, the actual happenings. Uncle Kirkor, when he was in the mood on certain mornings, dressed Niko, renowned for his mastery in waistcoat tailoring, teasing him with remarks about his alleged habit of filching, imitating the local Armenian accent: “You rascal, waistcoat tailor! Tell me how many yards of fabric have you ripped off from others for your waistcoats today, you dirty infidel?” In return, Niko, in his local Greek accent, got even for this recriminatory remark by retorting: “Cad! Weren’t you a
habitué
of bawdy houses that catered, at Sabri’s place, in return for some consideration, to the lust of people of lewd practices?” This was, apparently, a nod toward the ‘filching’ of Uncle Kirkor by an allusion to a closely-guarded and shameful secret known to a very few people; to a secret dating back to an almost forgotten time, that was wished to be consigned to oblivion. The publicizing of such an offense was thus compensated for by the disclosure of other offenses. This was an intimidation tactic used for restraining both parties from further revelations. Barring all these things, that long stage play, that prank played on life, in other words that buffoonery that aimed to remain linked to the places in question necessitated the enactment and representation of those scenes. As for those offenses . . . had there been no such offenses there would have been no heroes; without them the heroes in question would not and could not even conceive that such creation had ever taken place. That moral order knew how to absorb and adapt to the said errors. The comments that have reached me from those times confirm my convictions. Thanks to the personalities of Niko and Uncle Kirkor, everybody had, after a while, found some happiness. Niko was partly justified in alluding to the bawd Sabri who had been instrumental in catering to the needs of the men of Istanbul at the time by opening the doors of perception for them, having it in mind to remind Uncle Kirkor of a time in his life which he preferred to keep secret from the general public. As a matter of fact, I had had some information about this past . . . According to the gossipers, Uncle Kirkor used to pay visits to a great many brothels on the notorious Abanoz Street. He had continued to pay his visits to the houses of ill repute, even when he had become old, when he married Madame Ani. According to some, this had a very simple, ordinary and specific explanation, although others considered it rather important. Uncle Kirkor had fallen in love with a woman there who had not only embraced his disability, but who had also taught him how to live with originality. One day, without saying anything to anyone, she left to work in a brothel in İzmir, and, according to the accounts of the residents of that notorious street, married a pharmacist’s assistant much older than herself, who earned his living by measuring the blood pressure of people in the surroundings area by means of an outdated sphygmomanometer, eventually settling at Karataş. This was the whole story, at least the story that had reached our ears. We could never learn the name of his lover. No definitive understanding could be ascertained as to the truth behind this story whose origin had remained a complete mystery, and whether this was exactly how it had played out or not no one knew . . . Nor could we learn how the news of her marriage had been received by Uncle Kirkor. All that one could ascertain was the fact that Uncle Kirkor had ceased to frequent the said quarters and retreated from view. This was the moot point that Niko had been harping on about. I know for a fact that he tried to establish the links from a distance while he was treading a path in a different time frame. I may have missed certain details, of course. Yet, looked at from this angle, I cannot deny the fact that I do sense some sort of treachery in this mnemonic.