Many and Many a Year Ago (10 page)

“The year I completed my PhD thesis—1965—my father told me that Haluk had paid off his debt with interest in two transfers, six months apart, from Ziraat Bank in Ayvalık. I don't know how much this will help you. I imagine Count Nadolsky wanted to ease his conscience a bit. Who knows, maybe the inheritance will prove a turning point in the lives of Haluk's innocent children—if he has any.

“I sent an apologetic letter to Hasan but it came back marked, ‘No forwarding address. Return to sender.' Before I go back to Grenoble this time, maybe I should drop by Eskişehir …”

The professor invited me to view the nude male sculptures he'd brought back from France along with the Fikret Mualla drawings he'd purchased from the artist for the price of a glass of wine. I delicately declined.

On the drive back to Trabzon the delicate filigree of mist before our eyes slowly lifted and I felt like a Byzantine choir was rising to a crescendo in the hush after the afternoon
ezan
. To the right of the highway a sequence of heavy buildings hunkered between the sea and the mountains. We soon found ourselves in Trabzon again. As we said goodbye in front of the Zorlu Grand Hotel, the cab driver said, “For the love of Allah, brother, don't hide your talent under a bushel. You're a detective!”

I couldn't book a decent seat on the Ankara-Ä°zmir bus, so I convinced myself to fly. As I boarded the plane I was sure I would hear my inner voice announce, “Welcome aboard the ox-cart of the skies. Have a nice flight.” The bumper sticker on the taxi I took from Ä°zmir to Ayvalık sported a rhyme, “This super taka / Made in Karşıyaka.” It was Greek to me. The swarthy driver, Sadi, pointed out twice that he was a middle-school teacher who had taken up driving to pay his credit card debts. On hearing that it was my first visit to Ayvalık, he automatically began, “Neighbor to the Mount Ida of Homeric myth, Ayvalık is a paradise of sea, forest, and fresh air. One of the world's premier olive-oil centers for the last two hundred …” I closed my eyes; I wanted to play Brahms' ‘Hungarian Dance No. 1' to myself. We stopped for a snack at a gas station and Sadi asked what I did. I told him I was a detective. I vowed there and then, amidst the smell of gasoline and piss, to go home on the first bus if I failed to find Haluk Batumlu.

The city lights appeared in the distance as Sadi—not such a great driver, judging from his death grip on the steering wheel—was explaining, “Ayvalık, boss, is actually a holiday resort favored by anti-high society Istanbulites and Ankara bureaucrats.” He sounded like a collaborator trying to suck up to the invading army commander by giving him a reason to like the place.

The pungent smell that affronted my nostrils at the Ayvalık Palace Hotel, located between the bazaar and the sea, was annoying, but it would grow on me. It was a fragrance secreted by olive oil factories on their night shift, and it followed me to my room like a friendly street dog. I asked the receptionist, who greeted me in English, if he knew Haluk Batumlu though I knew all too well what the answer would be. Bored by the view of the Martı Restaurant and the murky sea from my third-floor room, I wandered out to the bazaar. The olive-oil aroma, sadly, had gone. But I knew that strolling along these quiet dark streets would relax me. As I entered a café with a TV blaring, an analogy between myself and a dung-beetle rose to mind. The only customers were two old men practically glued to their table, gawking and grinning at the TV with the night-shift waiter.

“Ayvalık only wakes up after the schools shut down for the summer,” said the horse-headed waiter when he brought me my sage tea. The old codgers stirred slightly during the commercials.

“If anybody knew this fellow—at least if he had a government job—it would be Muhtar Celal. He'll be dropping by the coffeehouse next to the Port Authority as soon as he finishes his breakfast,” said the swarthier of the two men, who gave a sniff of his nose after each round of his prayer beads.

I stopped for breakfast at a café under an arbor of grapevines and was surprised by the friendly reaction of the waiter when I ordered a toasted cheese and tomato sandwich. The people meandering along the labyrinthine streets seemed to be moving two beats slower than normal. I wondered whether they would speed up when the tourist season began. Muhtar Celal appeared to be in his seventies and wore a woolen vest over his short-sleeved shirt. I had a fleeting urge to ask how he filled his days once he finished his morning newspaper. He observed that people had been calling him “Muhtar” ever since the day he ran for the councillor's office and lost. No, he wasn't aware of the existence of a person called Haluk Batumlu. There was, however, someone called Haluk Erçelik the French teacher, who had lived on Marshal Çakmak Avenue. But he didn't know where this Haluk came from exactly, nor where he went when he left.

I stood up with the pleasant feeling of having done my best, and walked happily off to buy a bus ticket to Istanbul. But as I neared the station, which looked more like a rodeo arena, my inner voice, that devil's advocate, whispered: Is it possible that Haluk Batumlu changed his last name to cut his ties with the past?

The pounding in my head intensified as I called Ali Uzel.

“Professor, if a fanatic Stalinist wanted to change his last name, what would you advise him?”

“In Russian, Stalin means ‘made of steel',” he said. “Permit me to call to your attention the resemblance between ‘Stalin' and ‘steel' in English. If I were a Turkish Stalinist, I think I would choose a surname like ‘Çelik' or ‘Özçelik.' You know, ‘steel' or ‘real steel.'”

Or “Erçelik”—“true steel.”

“Are you okay?” he asked, as I hung up. I was up to my neck again in the Haluk Batumlu case. I chuckled nervously to myself as, instead of asking for a ticket at the window, I requested directions to Marshal Çakmak Avenue.

The streets that ran up the hill past a store selling books, stationery and real estate to the old Greek neighborhood had various sacred and epic names attached to them. The mortar smeared on the limestone buildings looked like poorly applied suntan lotion. The zigzag streets designed for bicycles and horse carts reminded me of Balat, except for the lack of screaming children. I was happily distracted from my search by the pleasant sight of bougainvillea vines and pomegranate branches draped over the stone walls. As for the women sulking at their windows, it was as if they had all turned down their radios so as not to miss the command, “Come on, get up, we're going back!”, when it came.

At the ground-floor window of a ruined building on Marshal Çakmak Avenue sat a smiling middle-aged man whose body, below his chest and shoulders, remained hidden. When I told him I had some business with Haluk Erçelik he became effusive.

“Haluk the French teacher, God knows, was the Rock Hudson of Ayvalık society. He lived on the top floor of Number 19b, just behind you. The women and girls, young and old, used to dress to the nines and parade in front of his door. I think it was the year Tony Shumacher transferred to the Fenerbahçe football team—wow, that's nearly twenty years ago—that his wife finally put her foot down and they moved away overnight. He told me that they'd bought an olive grove near C. village. Maybe …”

Suddenly a very large white-haired woman appeared behind him, screeching, “Eh, Mahmut, enjoying ourselves with the passers-by again, are we? Don't you know God will strike you down, Mahmut? Eh?” She swooped down on the smiling man and snatched him up, whereupon I saw that he indeed had no limbs.

I had no better idea than to head down to the Clock Tower Mosque and watch the boys play football in the courtyard. My attention focused on a left-footed blond kid who ran circles around the opposing players and just grinned at his teammates whenever he lost the ball. When they got it back they passed it to him again. I soon wearied of watching this dramatic but repetitious circling. The match ended abruptly when a mosque official came out and planted himself in the middle of the courtyard. The sweaty boys scattered and in the wake of the cats and pigeons I also took my leave. It occurred to me while watching that blond ball-wizard that Hasan Gezgin and Halit Mesutoğlu could have been hiding something—a suspicion all the more reasonable if you looked at their stories side by side. The hope arose in me that if I bequeathed to Haluk Erçelik the happy news of his inheritance, he might reward me by spilling some dramatic secrets.

Trusting that Mahmut the Fenerbahçe fan hadn't been pulling my leg, I approached a
dolmuş
minibus idling beneath an acacia tree. I didn't warm to the mustachioed driver, but I did enjoy the olive-oil fragrance that enveloped the vehicle.

“You'll be there in ten minutes,” said Bilal from Harput, who opened the door and gave me the seat beside him. As we slalomed through the olive groves in the direction of Edremit, I followed the parade of patient trees with amazement. “The youngest of those trees is two hundred years old,” Bilal said, “and the oldest is six hundred.”

I was surprised too at the enormous mosque that appeared at the point where the tranquil village met the sea. The mosque looked like a blueprint for a town of 20,000 rather than the small village that it was. Not a person was in sight to ask directions. “Are they all at a meeting in the mosque?” Bilal asked, then hurried toward a man who finally appeared on the horizon. I waited on the bus. I understood that we'd found Haluk when I saw the grizzled villager pointing at a spot up in the hills. A mixture of curiosity and petulance swept over me and my right hand began to shake. I felt like praying for a flat tire.

The hill we climbed was silent and covered with olive groves. A bashful boy who was studiously flicking a cigarette lighter showed us which house belonged to Haluk. Ancient stone walls protected the garden, and a green mailbox hung next to the main gate. With a silent
Bismillah
I pushed the doorbell. A middle-aged man who looked like a bodyguard emerged and said with some surliness, “What d'ya want?” I told him I was bringing news of his boss's old-time pals Halit and Hasan. He barked a command—it sounded like Kurdish—and threw his cellphone to a little girl in a bright red dress who came running up. She pushed a couple of buttons—trying hard not to laugh—and handed the phone back to her father. I knew the exchange between this neatly mustachioed fellow and his boss would be short.

Immediately on entering the rectangular garden, I had to let myself be sniffed by a large Kangal mastiff named Arrow. “Otherwise, God forbid, he might tear you to pieces,” said Haluk's long-time factotum. The man was Zakir by name, and hailed from Bitlis in the east. Having mentioned in passing that he could hit the eye of a blackbird from 300 yards but, alas, was incapable of mastering a cellphone, he said, “If ya don't mind me askin', sir, what is it ya do for a livin'?” When I said that I was a retired Air Force officer and pilot he declared, “Allah be praised!” and fell in two steps behind me until we came to his boss.

Each fine old olive tree that caught my eye looked at first like a unique grotesque; taken as a group, however, I saw that they all moved in harmony like figures in a melancholy painting. About the time the underappreciated baroque composer Viotti popped into my mind, I came face to face with Haluk Erçelik, who stood waiting for me in the doorway of the two-story stone house.

He was tall and fit. I tried to associate this handsome man with the name of a particular movie star, but couldn't. Then it came to me why. It was because, with his long silvery hair gathered at the nape of his neck and the perfect features of his proud face, he resembled nothing so much as a statue of Apollo.

Actually those piercing green eyes might not have been so benevolent a gift from God. His tone was peremptory. He tried to reduce the tension of my surprise visit by donning a mock sincerity. The walls of the study we entered were covered with books. Bereket—Zakir's wife, I assumed—offered home-made lemonade, her sidelong glances meanwhile betraying the fact that this was a house not used to lavish hospitality. I found myself suddenly missing Balat.

When I disclosed to him the news about the $1.3 million something about the way he chuckled, like a person responding courteously to a clumsy anecdote, struck me. I tried to provoke a response by repeating word for word what his once-close friends had said.

When he saw that I'd uttered my last sentence he put two fingers to his mouth and whistled. He didn't open his mouth until Bereket appeared with a small bottle of
raki
, a glass of the turnip juice they drink with it in the south, and a bowl of nuts. As I awaited his next move the oil painting behind him caught my eye. Had that young, beautiful, and seemingly blind girl been eavesdropping on me? Was she now looking at me sympathetically?

I relaxed as Haluk shut his eyes and took a long sip of
raki
. I guessed I was going to hear more than I'd bargained for.

“When my father, a sailor from Hopa, on the Black Sea, married my mother, whom he'd met during his military service in Diyarbakir, they were disowned by both families. Their penniless friends took turns hosting them until eventually they found shelter in a rented flat in Balat. My father's lifelong dream was to work with his cousin on long-haul cargo ships until he was thirty, and then open a fancy fish restaurant in Salacak on the Asian side of Istanbul. I was just five when the news arrived that he'd been killed in an accident at a South Asian port.

“As a boy I was the mascot of the Balat streets. The lord of the district, Count Nadolsky, showed his affection for me by calling me
belka
—‘squirrel' in Russian. His offer to become our benefactor shocked us at first. But my mother took over running his house, and slowly became attached to this White Russian who had saved us from going to live with my dictatorial grandfather.

“His exiled majesty, who ordered me to call him Vlad Baba, was forty-six when he came into our life. He was a charming vagabond, energetic but also fickle. He looked after me well, yet on occasion would order me around like a lowly conscript. When he acquired Turkish citizenship after twenty years of sanctuary in Istanbul, he drew himself up as if he'd done us a favor. Once he was complimented on his Turkish by his favorite author, Peyami Safa, to which he replied, ‘You should hear my English and French.' He was close to Istanbul's consulate circles. He gave fencing and chess lessons to a few diplomats and taught foreign languages in the minority schools.