Istanbul Was a Fairy Tale (90 page)

Days had been spent enjoying such happy moments in addition to experiencing fears and indignations needing to be hidden. Arguments and disputes were an integral part of life; these were inevitable and served in a sense to understand life better. The imposition of taxes and the revolutions had been consigned to the past. Having made a modest fortune, he had, in conformity with the rule to this effect, bought Madame Roza in succession: a fur coat, a mink overcoat, and a diamond ring from Master Dikran, his jeweler friend at the covered bazaar. They had not failed to take trips to Rome, Milan, Paris, London, Vienna, Athens, Geneva, Barcelona, and Palma de Majorca. He himself had also made business trips to London and Geneva. They hadn’t missed the opportunity to visit their relatives in Israel. These visits differed from their tourist trips in that they did not have to look for a hotel or cover the boarding and lodging expenses. Instead, they used to take with them such items as salt bonito, sausage flavored with garlic, beef smoked and dried in the sun, thin sheets of dough, and white cheese. The tourists had to buy such food locally before bringing it to their point of departure. All these things from a country far in the distance were to compensate for the cost of free lodging. However this wasn’t a simple barter. It was a question of reviving a forgotten aftertaste. The expectation that certain places could never be consigned to oblivion had once more been on the agenda. Such experiences could not be felt in other cities; they had had proof of this. In other cities, they had followed their friends’ recommendations and put up at modest and fairly comfortable hotels. The rest involved shopping, the proof of their being abroad which they showed off.

Olga, who had expressed her disapproval and indignation through such gestures and behavior, had not reacted by word of mouth. In her silence there seemed to have been concealed a struggle related to the preservation of her pride and to a better understanding of her femininity. This struggle was directed to the defense of her pride to the bitter end and to the refusal to make use of her despair as a shield, in full consciousness of the fact that man was destined to remain alone sooner or later . . . even though such an attitude frequently opened the door to solitude. Right here he had to come to a standstill. He knew it, he knew . . . In his actual solitude, at a time when he had no one who would shelter him, he realized that he could not be pretentious, that he could cover that long distance only through little steps. Despite the fact that he had missed Olga, he had to pass the weekend with his family, as he couldn’t dare do otherwise. They often went to the Hotel Tarabya for their five o’clock tea. Sometimes they were joined by friends. In summer, they used to call at the summer house after their tea session at the Stavropulos’, their neighbors. Monsieur Stavropulos, a short while after the death of his first wife, ‘fat Filiça,’ at quite a young age—an islander who had no merit other than being an excellent cook—had married a young widow by the name of Afro, an attractive woman having the potential to seduce the majority of men in her circle by her liveliness, charming smile, and looks. This followed the death of her first husband, who used to give French courses at the
Lycée
Zografyon
. Mihali, who had led an extremely sober life during his first marriage and earned the name of ‘the miser,’ had, after his second marriage, been frivolous with his money just to show that he was far wealthier than what people thought him to be. By the way, Afro had brought her sister Sophie along to the house with her. Their joint life seemed to be a happy one.

The trip to Tarabya was made by a community taxi which was later on replaced by a car they had purchased. The car in question was a
Desoto
, a trendy vehicle according to the day’s fashion which they made use of only on weekends. He had stuck to his custom of traveling to and from his office by taxi. Repeating to himself over and over again that life required the endurance of hard times, he waited in line for several hours on rainy winter days and sunny summer days with complete resignation. To be anxious about what the future would bring despite past acquisitions demanded a considerable command of one’s doubt. Yet, as time went by, even these visions had undergone transformation and passed on to another history. Berti had traveled to the shop with a black
Humber
he had bought from a retired senior officer who had been in the employ of the British Consulate. Times were changing just like in the flow of fiction, of film, and in song. He used to give him a lift. They hardly spoke while on the road. They hardly spoke at all.

If only I could find rose petals

A pair of eyes, the eyes of an outsider, could, from a distance, descry only little departures in lives earned gradually. The same eyes could also see another aspect of the impossibility of moving on. Those eyes were looking from a distance; they had opted to keep their distance, or saw the incidents, inclinations, and the things one preferred to have always before him from a distance. In order to derive a true satisfaction required a
Weltanschauung
which could be obtained only from experience. This was another sort of mastery . . . another sort of skill . . . a skill which he could not help perpetuating with suspicion and regret, despite the encouraging glances of his friends at times of no return and solitude. He was conscious of those times. The things he had left behind and those acquisitions believed to have been enjoyed were amenable for discussion, arousing deficiencies and emotions that seemed to have been suspended or sunken into oblivion. Those emotions had effectively been lived and were to be lived. However, he had another mastery which had marked a turning point in his life, that served his enjoyment of certain hours of his life with a feeling of genuine pride; this mastery was such that those who knew those hours or who were out in the open did not feel capable of discussing it and had to remain content with simply watching. In the eyes of the people with whom he shared those hours, he was known to be a master of bezique. Every Sunday afternoon he and his friends gathered in a given house to sit for a card game. The real aim was to come together, to fool away the time, not to feel lonely, and instead to feel that one belonged to a community. Those who had adopted this lifestyle knew this emotion all too well. They could speak to each other during those meetings around the table of their experiences and their daring actions. The emotion of collective life was experienced differently, of course, according to the person involved. Actually, what was experienced there were the experiences which they mutually found in each other and could magnify. This was partly responsible for the lingering of his renown as a master. It was as though he had established a whole kingdom that was reluctant to make a show of itself. A small kingdom that was beyond the reach of a simple game; a kingdom that might at times remind each other of the fact that one or two touches might sometimes conceal a deeper meaning. Those Sundays had made those years more meaningful and colorful. The absence of those Sundays, that absence one could hardly explain to anyone or speak about to anyone, was compensated by these little victories. Everything had undergone change, the companions, the community, the houses, the streets, the dishes, and the manner of serving them had all changed, except for the little joy of the gathering and the superiority of bezique. Their living space had dwindled, and ended up confining each of them to a single room. Some of his acquaintances had passed away. He didn’t know who remained and where were those who had survived, and with which emotions. All that he knew was that he had not played cards for years. Those who could still remember his skill would now be very distant and stood in his mind only through their virtual images. He understood his abandonment better at such times and that the days lived were actually the days of other people. This was another facet of death.

After the purchase of the car, their trips to the Bosporus had become more frequent. Before paying a visit to a friend, it had become their custom to have their lunch at a restaurant by the seaside or to consume that delightful flaky pastry with plenty of powdered sugar sprinkled on it and to have a cup or two of brewed tea served in their car by the sea at that renowned pastry shop in Büyükdere. These actions added meaning to their behavior. The entire family had to congregate and exhibit their presence to the fellow human beings they encountered there. Those little scenes came back to his imagination now despite the white lies and deceptions veiled in the unsoiled colors. He had missed those places so much. Could he tell Berti about this yearning of his? If only they could go there, to the seaside on a Sunday morning . . . he could no longer eat the flaky pastry as he was not allowed to; he could, though, perhaps taste a morsel or two, and have a cup of weak tea, failing which, flower tea. The important thing was to be able to inhale that bracing sea air. He knew that much had changed there as well; he had seen on the TV that in place of old houses new ones had been built and that certain streets had been widened. However, he had learned how to behave in the presence of radical changes and absences. He would still go to the seaside all the same, to roam the streets that had superseded the old ones and make as if he could not perceive them in their true colors. He would make as if he did not see what he ought to have seen. As a matter of fact, he had acted in this same way through the many instances of his disappointments and delusions. To ignore the whole thing, perhaps that was the best thing to do. The years had taught him how to wear such a countenance. Moreover here was another street, another road . . . and he might live there by his own sea in other people’s worlds. He might try to protect his own world or build it up among those of others. This story was his story.

The walls were the walls of all of us

To cope with certain heartaches by just ignoring them, keeping them within one’s breast, or at least not showing them to others had a meaning of course. It was as though there was an original emotion concealed beyond all resentment and indignation likely to shed some light on a private past, not always easily accessible to anyone. One could live more at ease perhaps in that corner believing all the while that no pain was insurmountable. Monsieur Jacques, the person I had known, effectively entertained this belief. One could also learn how to live with wounds unscarred, despite all the victories achieved in the meantime. When I ruminate over that long story which I’m intending to write one day, based on what he has left in me, I feel inclined to think that I can approach him more closely. In that story, I think, I must make a few more steps forward. To be bold enough to take a few more steps forward means renewing his hopes. However, before taking such steps, I feel inclined to inquire of myself whether I have the right to intrude in someone’s life, when it occurs to me to revise what I’m intending to disclose. I had felt the same concern elsewhere as well. There were people that crowded my imagination, whose lives I intended to narrate for the sake of that long story I’m purporting to recount. Those were people who had given me their precious photographs, people who had inspired in me the fictions I had made up; people who had seen me both as a spectator and as a hero who would at least have a part to play in the story. To delineate the boundaries was my responsibility. The walls were once more my own. On the other hand, I was aware that I would never be able to thoroughly understand those people. That was to do with the method one would adopt and the manner by which one approached an individual. One morning, as I woke up, it occurred to me to visualize Monsieur Jacques as though he had penetrated my soul even in his moments of absolute solitude, and, based on his own accounts as well as on the accounts of others, I had tried to tell his story. I found myself in a labyrinth that led backward. In order to persuade myself in the first place that certain emotions were better described in this way, I had, at first, ignored those problems that were related to time and interior monologues. My own interpretations might well lead me to fatal errors; yet, in all consciousness of my situation, I took the challenge and on I proceeded. I felt obliged to convey this man who had made me a gift of so many things in life. I know that this seems to be a self-indulgence which denotes, like all self-indulgences, a self-preservation. Now, after all that I have gone through, I ask myself once more whether I had the right to gain ground in that field. I might, of course, find some justification in defending myself, saying that I had seen what I had seen from my own angle. I can even go so far as to assert that his life had exposed itself to me only somewhat in certain aspects. Here again, I sensed that there was in me a desire to find some shelter in these flights, in the escapes from both others and myself. Thus the words and the probable interior monologues were being resuscitated. Could I try to probe into the origin of these escapes? Could I find out in whom or in what I was trying to find shelter? And would I be able to disclose what I had found and give voice to it? These questions have never found their answers. Perhaps I don’t propose to find any answer to them. The emotion that that screen of fantasy provides me with satisfies my expectations . . . This repetition and reiteration does not upset me anymore. For, we are lured by our errors which we nourish with our truths, or by our truths which exhibit voracity for our errors, not only in our factual experiences but in our world of imagination as well. When we try to convey a person to his fellow being, the person we want to be lurks behind. That is why I have qualms about my unconscious personal involvement in the story of Monsieur Jacques I am writing. What else could I do? To have recourse to the accounts of other witnesses and make use of a reported speech would be an alternative . . . I might, for instance, move away and keep a comfortable distance from him and try in my own darkness, taking into consideration my own weaknesses, where nobody would see me, to assume the role of a new spectator. I’m conscious of the fact that this was one of the ways that would likely enable me to understand a person, i.e. using different languages. But then, had I ventured to do so, I would have run the risk of moving away from the sincerity which I resolutely intended to preserve. I just couldn’t allow my people to be expressed in other languages. That was the reason I had decided to make headway toward that place in the company of all my wrongs. That was the place where I might run into people whom I wanted to obliterate from my life. I had reached that boundary from which there was no return. Man never feels satisfied, he always wants to take another step forward, another and another . . . having it in mind to forget the steps he has taken not too long ago, or the steps where he had first made his strides in order to delay his return to the man he now cannot find as he had left him, the man he can no longer see. Another step, just another step forward . . . This explains why that story keeps making headway within me despite the lapse of such a long time. That is why that vision haunts me every now and then; it haunts me at present with an increased number of words and multiplied details. Monsieur Jacques, in his house, confined to his last chamber, removed from everyone, during the lonely hours he spent all alone, tried to understand his life and his people through journeying back in time. He ruminates, he smiles, he buries himself in bottomless silences. He broods and becomes an actor in his own stage play. Personally, I’m trying to understand him in my capacity as a witness to many a turn of events in the hope of getting nearer to him. The real responsibility gains value through the emotions that this testimony gives rise to. To bear testimony means to be responsible. I might have delayed in deciding on my role in the play, but I had succeeded in the end. I simply wanted to watch and listen to what was being spoken and multiply it through my own words. This was a short play, ideal for listening. Years would go by and emotions would find their places. We knew it; we had tried to express it clearly, by our looks, gestures, and touches, although words might remain insufficient. This was a short play for listeners. In a world where the number of listeners or of people willing to listen kept on dwindling, everybody needed to talk, and there were all sorts of facts needing to be discussed. We were living in a world wherein it was the desire of the listeners to listen only for their own sake. This was another facet of the story that tried to conceal itself . . . one of the facets of the story that kept calling me against the likelihood of losing me altogether. This may have been a reason for my delusion of having been called by those witnesses . . . My story had been written for ‘that place,’ ‘in them,’ which I had never given up seeking. Monsieur Jacques was one of those heroes in this present text. In those days there appeared to be a time when relaxing was as important as listening. My testimony also implied the fear of plunging into solitude—the gradual construction of loneliness. The visions I have of him confirm this impression.