Many and Many a Year Ago (21 page)

“Yes,” I said, “I found him, but I can't settle accounts with him because he's hiding somewhere beyond my reach.”

“Does this pervert have a lot of money?”

“He's plenty rich and plenty smart too,” I replied, trying to indicate with a look that his choice of words was perhaps a little extreme.

“You don't seem to want to talk a lot about it,” he said. “Well, bring your glass here and let's drink to other things …”

The porch at the top of the tree-covered hill had the ambience of a retired sultan's royal caique. The view of the misty Aegean from this shady eyrie transported me. The soft wind fell back into the sea after sighing up the hill to kiss my face, and fresh fragrances filled the air as the sun sank, producing a peaceful feeling that the buzzing of the locusts only increased: the joy of it all made me feel that my chair might become slowly airborne, until Haluk said, “There's so much oxygen on this hillside that a man can't quench his thirst.” When our conversation turned to the confessional, he spoke first, as I expected he would, of his deceased wife.

“Women go through a more basic change in the ageing process than men,” he said, opening the second bottle. “I wore myself out trying to deal with Nalan, who was a very fragile woman … But ever since we challenged the world hand-in-hand when we were twenty-one we overcame every crisis together … The moment my wife died I turned into a zombie, Kemal. I woke up every day only to feel the pain worsen. If my hand went out to a
raki
glass, I remembered the first day our eyes met. Following my doctor's advice I cut my drinking to every other day, and I spend at least two hours at Nalan's grave on my sober days. When Sim heard that I'd fallen asleep in the plot I reserved for myself next to Nalan's, she said, ‘Are you rehearsing?'

“No, Kemal, even in the soap operas you won't see such things as have befallen my granddaughter, who is my reason for enduring all this!

“… Sim fell in love with a kid younger than herself, a student in the School of Architecture at the same university. The Rasputinesque Rebii Güler was ‘by birth a potential world-class architect and painter.' But what Nalan said about this insipid hanger-on of Sim's was, ‘There's no spark of love in that boy's eyes.'

“Two years ago Rebii was drunk and driving his Jeep when he crashed into a minibus on the Bosphorus road. Sim was in the front seat. Her seat belt came undone and she flew through the windshield. At the hospital, where we could hardly bear to look at her lacerated face, we learned that she had lost her sight. The accident report declared that the boy had not been under the influence of alcohol and that Sim's seat belt had not been well fastened. It did no good, of course, when my granddaughter regained consciousness, to learn that it was a fraudulent report. Rebii's father was a wealthy dentist with powerful connections. This unscrupulous man immediately packed his son off to Paris and discharged his obligations to us with a reluctantly apologetic phone call.

“Day and night for six months we took turns being tormented in hospitals reeking of death in Istanbul and London … We suffered a severe meltdown both emotionally and financially. The stress of this period muted our jubilation over the success of the reconstructive surgery. Sim's face was recovering even as she mourned Rebii's disappearance. It was her ophthalmologist who broke the news that with a cornea transplant my granddaughter would be able to see again. I knocked literally on every possible door until I found a suitable pair of corneas … The surgery too was a success. The next day, when she opened her eyes, Sim announced timidly that she could see, but only in gray tones. We returned home when she reached the point of ‘seeing the world like a Nazmi Ziya painting behind tulle.' We sacrificed a lamb in thanksgiving. But that was it; our happiness could go no further. Within a month the poor girl's eyes had closed again. According to the officious professor who performed the surgery, her body had rejected the corneas. He told us we could apply to an American clinic specializing in this type of case—if we happened to have a few hundred thousand dollars to spare. I could have spat in his face.

“Sim was in fact getting stronger, but when she lost her grandmother she fell apart again. The psychiatrist indicated that she could recover from her depression in two years or so with medicine and moral support. It's been more than a year now since my wife died. And if you ask me she's no better.

“If we'd simply told her that the new resident of Vlad Baba's house had brought her a CD from Buenos Aires she wouldn't have bothered to come out of her room. But when she heard about your accident—which tore you away from the military but not from life … You'll be meeting Sim when you have your coffee.”

We passed into the empty living room of the stone house, which was as luminous as a ghost in the descending darkness. It was good that he kept his eye on me as he brought Sim into the room and took our orders for coffee. Her smoke-colored glasses could not conceal her attractive face. Her hair was tied in a pony-tail, making her broad forehead more prominent. (Hayri Abi used to say that women with large foreheads were both intelligent and obstinate.) She could be considered tall. She wore a pale pink T-shirt and gray trousers. As she approached me I was startled by Haluk's signal to rise and shake her hand. She said, in a lucid and sad voice, as she seated herself next to her grandfather, “I heard that you survived a terrible accident. I hope you're all right now.”

Empowered by the fact that she was four years younger, I said, “We should both be grateful that we're still alive. But you seem luckier than I, since you'll be able to start seeing and painting after your operation. Me, on the other hand, they wouldn't even give a helicopter for safekeeping.” This made her grandfather nod his head in earnest. My tongue was loosened. I thought the story of Professor Ali and Esther would entertain them both, so I held nothing back except for the clue laid down by Suat. When Sim scolded her grandfather for dozing off, I felt as relieved as a nanny who's just passed a test posed by a difficult child she's about to start minding.

I received an invitation to breakfast the next morning, which I couldn't refuse, although Haluk's request that I punctuate it with a musical presentation of the CDs I'd brought along seemed a bit much. Zakir's son drove me back to the hotel in Sim's purple Jeep. Samsun was the name of this fellow, who was earnestly trying to be macho by complaining about how easy his military service on the Bulgarian border had been. It was probably the umpteenth time he'd explained how he got his name: his father had named him after his prison cellmate's hometown. He added that his sister's name, Renk—“color”—was “a gift from Miss Sim.” It was clear that he would be gratified by a question like, “How long have you been working for Haluk Bey?”

“When my father got out of prison he came to Ayvalık for seasonal work. The year I was about to start grade school, he called me and my mother to C. because he was going to work for Haluk Bey. That was fifteen years ago. Hereabouts they always called me Kurdish Samsun, Captain. Our boss always paid for my education, so when he almost went broke I quit school. He's our provider and we've become a natural part of the olive grove now. We're all upset about what happened to Mrs. Nalan and Miss Sim, Captain. Each one of us came and bowed to our patron and said that we were ready to give an eye for our miss any time he wanted. The boss thanked us and said if this was possible he would have given both of his own eyes. I swear by the holy book that it wasn't a joke when I asked him to let me go and cut the eyes out of that shameless boy and his worthless dishonorable father, Captain. Mr. Haluk said that people without honor will get their reward in the other world if not this one. Right now the main thing is for Sim to get well enough to be operated on again. Once there was a deserter from the army, a private I knew, his name was Dervish, and he said that the angels and devils are inside us and not outside and that hell and heaven are on earth and all this stuff has got me mixed up real bad …”

“Samsun, please stop calling me ‘Captain',” I said, trying to calm this potential self-sacrificer. “If your deserter had been an F-16 pilot he would have known that heaven is not on earth. And Mr. Haluk is not worried about Sim; by next year at the latest he will send her to a specialist clinic in America for an operation.”

“My mother heard our boss talking to his granddaughter and saying that he might have to sell both olive groves to raise the money for the operation. Miss Sim yelled, ‘I won't let those groves be sold for a risky operation.' Since I heard this I buy a lottery ticket three times a month and play lotto once a week.”

I said hello to the night shift in the lobby and went up to my room to gaze at the lights on the point. The satisfying duet between darkness and silence brought me to my senses. A trickle of olive-oil aroma entered the midnight mosaic, somehow reminding me of the Rameau concert I'd missed on the radio. I think Suat had had two expectations when he bequeathed me an apartment and a salary: the first was that I would help Ali and Esther get together; as for the second, I didn't know how I was supposed to help a blind girl. As I undressed for bed I should have been considering my limitations. Instead, what was on my mind was the line, “Alone under a shooting star, a girl undressing.” I was sifting my memory for its author when I dozed off …

I wondered how I must have looked to Samsun, who, when he came to pick me up the next morning and take me to the stone house, could say nothing more than “Good morning, Captain.” The host and hostess attended breakfast in fashionable attire. I set up for my presentation, and it was amusing to see them take the chairs closest to the stereo. “I chose one piece each from twenty tango singers. If you feel you've been hearing the same thing after number five, please alert me,” I said before starting. Maybe this was why they managed to look interested all the way through.

After the music, when Haluk proposed that I read to Sim, I could have shouted, “Yes! Gladly!” I was startled when he linked our arms together for the climb to the second floor. Three walls of the spacious salon were covered with paintings. “Do you like painting?” asked Sim with a kind of moan. Nothing could more precisely have expressed the pain of being unable to see.

I probably disappointed my inner voice by composing a reply like, “Actually, I tend to feel as if I'm both reading poems and viewing paintings when I'm listening to baroque music, Sim.”

The gray cat curled up at the end of the brass bed snarled at me. Momentarily animated, Sim said, “And this is my roommate, Ash.” I noticed the lively colors of the hand-woven rug on the floor. Then I saw the seven thick books on the antique desk that was a gift from Count Nadolsky. I was stunned. Marcel Proust's magnum opus was to be read, according to Nalan Erçelik, when one reached the age of thirty-five. “I've aged ten years in the last two.” said Sim, “I'm ready for
Remembrance of Things Past
.”

We took our places in the two bamboo chairs across from the desk and I began to read
Swann's Way
:

For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes,

when I had put out my candle, my eyes would

close so quickly that I had not even time to

say to myself, “I'm falling asleep.” And

half an hour later the thought that it

was time to go to sleep would

awaken me; I would wake as

if to put away the book which

I imagined was still in my

hands, and to blow out

the light; I had

gone on

thinking,

Those lines were the overture to a three-thousand-page symphony of prose. While the sentences tasted of poetry, the paragraphs tasted of tirades. I paid no attention to the sardonic smile brought, no doubt, to Sim's face by my naïve enthusiasm. My listener fell asleep during our reading session, and as I pulled a purple bedspread over her, on which was written, “The Limits of My Colors are the Limits of my World,” I felt as if I'd known her for months. The jealous Ash snarled as I wiped the perspiration from her brow with tissue paper, but I felt as relieved as a private who's survived his first watch. Sim rarely went out and when she did she needed assistance. Dutifully I walked arm-in-arm with her through the olive groves after our afternoon tea. She gathered that I was an anti-humorist. To set her at ease, I told her a little about my life.

That evening, as I returned for what would be my last night at the hotel, I was feeling restless. Next morning I was to move into the stone house. We were passing the “Welcome to Ayvalık” sign when Samsun said, “Captain, you can see now that Miss Sim is a lot higher caliber than those Istanbul girls angling to get married, even if she can't see. My mother sends her regards to you. She says if the lead pilot marries Sim, she and Renk will be at their service twenty-four hours a day. And me, I say that if you were to marry our angel, the lowly Samsun would be yours to command until he dies …”

From the window of my room on the ground floor of the stone house, the surrounding landscape looked like a gray-green ski run. I might have exercised my imagination by chasing a gray tulle curtain stretched like a line on the horizon between me and the sea. I grew familiar with the voices of the morning chorus perched in the wild fruit trees next to my room. As for the evening concert of migrating birds, it usually ended when the furious and arrogant wind blew down from Mount Ida. Sorrow, Solitude, Serenity, Scribe, Saddle, Sobriety, Scrap, Sigh, Spleen, Sortie: of the names Haluk's wife Nalan had bestowed on the tree-dervishes of the olive grove, these were the ones that stuck in my mind. Ever since my accident I'd been unable to fall asleep unless I lay face down, hugging my pillow. But now as soon as I turned off the lights and stretched out on the bed, glad not to know how many nights I would be there, my eyes closed before I had time to worry about getting to sleep. Even Arrow was aware that my presence had eased the tension in the grove. Whenever I went outside he ran up to allow me to pat his head respectfully. When we were eye to eye, I understood that, unlike Samsun, whatever he might do for me would be free of conditions. I started wondering whether it was nature that had set me up to settle down in this quiet olive orchard.