Many and Many a Year Ago (25 page)

As we headed toward Asmalımescit I had a goal in mind that I kept secret even from my inner voice: to have a quiet, good-natured girlfriend who loved music and possessed a rich inner life. When poor Sim, for whom I would always have a prayer or two to spare, went back to C., I would begin a new period by undertaking a quest of the heart free of time constraints and ulterior motives.

I was pleased to find Sim less cheerful than when I had left her. I cursed Samsun as I struggled to convince Banu that my feelings for Sim were those of a compassionate older brother. On the way back to Balat I had the feeling that Sim was preparing what she wanted to say to me. As we were putting her things in the closet I said, “I think of Samsun as a major character who pretends to be a minor one. Do you think I'm wrong?”

“If I answered in a word it wouldn't be fair to him. As a child he had problems adapting to C. He ran away from school when the other kids made fun of his name and accent. My grandfather, with a whip in his hand, taught him how to read and write and so saved him from prison. Samsun is devoted to all of us, but he worships my grandfather. When he was drinking in the bars until the early mornings it was Samsun who waited at the door, carried him home, put him to bed, and gave him his medicine. Another one of Samsun's jobs is dealing with the migrant workers who pick the olives at harvest time. I think you already noticed how sorry he was not to be given the additional responsibility of family bodyguard.

“He's able to multiply four-digit numbers in his head. So as not to be an extra burden to us, he turned in an empty paper for his university entrance exams. He reads radical newspapers and magazines and strange philosophical books. He has a peculiar sense of humor. He goes to the mosque on Friday and fasts during Rammadan. And whenever he falls into his father's folksy Turkish, he's definitely up to something.

“He never used the polite
hanım
in speaking to me until I started university. One day he came to my room and asked, very shyly, ‘Sister dear, do you think people have the right to fall in love just once?' I think he's still in love with the actress Meg Ryan. I'm worried that he might upset the applecart by doing something outrageous just as he's trying to make things right …” (If Sami was Suat Altan's Balat agent, then Samsun must be his man in Ayvalık. I no longer found this theory comical.)

We finished
The Sweet Cheat Gone
and
The Past Recaptured
in a week. As we neared the end of the masterpiece, it felt as if both the writer and his characters were getting a bit bored. (Was it perhaps the author's choice to consume the poetry like the last few grains of sand in an hourglass?) We went out every day as soon as we'd satisfied our reading quota. I could never be bored in the studio of the artist Sali Turan, who lived and breathed paint, or at the art gallery of Evin Iyem, an elegant woman with rapidly blinking eyes. At the concert I took Sim to I told her, “I won't let go of your hand until the second I feel that you're not bored.” I made her laugh by reading headlines I found in the tabloids left behind on the old ferries. At the Ahırkapı lighthouse forty ships sailed by before we noticed the rain falling on us. Together we took my latest article to the magazine office. When she was with me in the studio, my radio programs seemed more successful. She impressed Rifat Demren, as I knew she would. When she dozed off while watching a DVD of Ingmar Bergman's “Winter Light” I carried her to bed in my arms. On her last day we rushed off to the Akmerkez mall to buy her a hat. I gave the useless and comically dressed short-legged salesgirl, who was simultaneously sneering at and pitying my houseguest, a look that said, “It's because you know she's worth five of you even in her present condition that you're bursting with envy.”

Samsun came with the Jeep to collect Sim and her three suitcases and almost collapsed with laughter when I said, “What's 9,876 times 5,432?”

“I used to feel bad at being treated like a monkey, when everybody I met tried to test my meaningless talent, so I started giving them perfectly wrong answers. But when they continued to be impressed, I started enjoying myself. They usually give me numbers from nine to two in descending order …” he said.

I was happy to think that he'd ended his period of flattery. If he was trying to send me a message, I didn't care.

Sim said she would stay with me when she came for her check-up in six weeks time. Once I learned that she'd reached C. safely, I went out to Disco Eden, but it was closed. I didn't feel like going home so I climbed the stairs of Radio Estanbul in the dark, knowing I would find Rifat Demren reading in what he thought of as his temple.

“Rifat Bey,” I said. “After seeing Sim off, a weird thing happened to me. I'm irritated by the silence in my house, which I used to like just because it was silent.”

“I once saw a documentary about the octopus. It seems that the male turns completely scarlet when he touches the female, perhaps out of embarrassment. The female, on the other hand, stops eating after laying her eggs and waits five months for her offspring to emerge. When she sees them slip into the water, she dies in peace.”

He uttered a heart-rending whistle and returned to scribbling notes in the margins of his rare book.

“Brother, I'm not sure I understand what you mean, but if you're suggesting I'm in love with Sim, you're mistaken,” I said.

I woke up in a meaningless flurry of anxiety and felt like I needed an excuse to leave the house. I opened the living-room window to the pleasant crispness of the air and the gray sky. I put the Giuseppe and Giovanni Sammartini CDs in the beige bag that was a gift from Sim. I'd never walked to the station from home before. Along the way I realized that for the first time I'd left without shaving and eating breakfast. By the time I reached the Unkapanı Bridge I was missing the warmth of Sim's hand on my right arm. I speculated on when the feeling would leave. I decided not to bother with my “quest of the heart”; if it was in the stars, the woman of my life would find me. I stopped at a deserted buffet at the Tünel plaza and called Sim while waiting for my toast and sausages. I felt more at ease on hearing her, but the joy in her voice unsettled me. I said that I owed her a “Thank you” and that she owed me an apology: “I enjoyed very much having you as my houseguest, but you're damaging my relationship with my solitude.”

While recording in the studio I had to convince myself that Sim wasn't there too, sitting across from me. I listened to Adriana Varela over dinner, which consisted of a pastrami sandwich with pickled cabbage and a Malbec wine, followed by
tulumba
for dessert. I called Sami and said, “As long as you don't mention Sim's name, you can come over and I'll teach you chess.”

Next morning?

The thousands of musical notes flying toward each other from the four corners of my bed and the warm spring-like breeze wafting against my body were making me uneasy. I feared opening my eyes would cause me to miss a fantastic show. I turned on my side carefully, as if I were protecting a precious gift entrusted to me. And then the sublime nature of my inner voice dawned on me. I'd been anticipating instructions from it in vain. It had turned away from me and departed. I realized, as my eyes slowly opened, I was a new man.

I knew that her smiling image would greet my open eyes and I would feel her presence within me. Whether Suat Altan wanted it or not, I had fallen in love with Sim Erçelik. Having made this private announcement to myself, I leapt out of bed and threw myself face-down on the bed where she'd slept for a whole week. As I inhaled her fragrance I wondered whether the reason we got on so well was that she was blind. I felt like I was flying in the ocean and swimming in the clouds, growing lighter and lighter by the minute.

I jumped up again and rushed to the study. I took down the big dictionary and bemusedly looked up the word “love.” (If my life were a novel, the preceding sentence would be erased.) I was reassured to see that I met the parameters of the definition. Still, I thought the word should have had a more earth-shattering definition in view of the uniqueness of each case. On a sudden impulse I read Poe's “Annabel Lee” in Suat's manuscript once again. It struck me that the phrase “Many and many a year ago” was sufficient unto itself as a manifesto of true love.

Having resolved my crisis of joy, I called Professor Ali. He chuckled and said, “Let's meet at the Marmara Café.” He didn't take his eyes off the glass in front of him until I said, “My only fear is that, true, Sim won't refuse me now, but one day if she can see she might leave me.”

“I don't think you rushed into this thing too quickly. Everybody around you was saying what a nice couple you'd make and how when you walked arm in arm you became almost one body. I knew you'd call me after she went back. I'll make one and only one comment on this matter: just listen to your heart, my son.

“Now here's something else I have to tell you. Esther and I don't intend to leave anything behind us when we leave this world. The house we live in is yours. Besides that, I've got a good buyer for my old flat in Balat. I made a deal with Ken Melling, an American translator and lecturer at Kadir Has University, to sell him the place for $185,000. Your new neighbor-to-be is a likeable person in his sixties. I'll put the money in your bank account. It might come in handy for Sim's eye operation.

“Esther's bridge partner Perihan has a physician son who is coming from Boston to Istanbul for five days for a wedding. Kamil is on the staff of a well-known eye clinic there, and if you wish, he'll take a look at Sim's eyes.

My eyes filled with tears. “Professor, I don't know what to say. This is too much.”

“You deserve no less, son,” he said.

Perhaps because of the heightened emotion, I gave him a quick summary of how Suat Altan had become my benefactor. Seeing that he wasn't particularly impressed, I kept the part about Suat playing Cupid to us to myself. I walked him to the Taksim metro. There were tears in our eyes as we embraced goodbye.

I dove into Sıraselviler Avenue on the heels of a nervous ambulance. Then I remembered that Rifat Demren's favorite restaurant wasn't open for lunch. I leaned against the Changa Restaurant's closed iron door and phoned Sim.

“I wonder myself what words are going to come out of my mouth,” I started by saying. “You were my houseguest for just ten days but what you left behind is ten years' worth of yearning. I planned to infuse the joy of life into you because your eyes were shut, but you taught me to see a myriad of hues with my own eyes. When I go walking now I feel the absence of your warmth like a missing piece of my own body. Whatever I see in the city I feel like describing it to you in all its colors, and when I feel your absence something in me falls to pieces. You ruined my relationship with Bach and Vivaldi. Your eyes are the most alluring in the world, even if they're not open. If I don't say ‘I love you,' it's because it sounds too ordinary. And if you say ‘Yes' to my coming to you, I'll never leave you again, Sim!”

“Yes, come immediately,” she replied. Staggered by the force of the fireworks that exploded inside me upon these words, I collapsed. When I opened my eyes again I was a strange bird. I got up and walked, and I was a line of musical notes. Swinging and swaying I made my way back home …

The sturdy man I ran into on the stairs was Ken Melling. I invited him in for green tea and gave him a tour of the house. Standing before an out-of-the-way shelf in the library he said, “I don't know rare books all that well, but there are two leatherbound volumes with coats-of-arms there that could be valuable.”

As he left he said, “They're about to start major repairs on my apartment. I'll move in after the new year, and the first thing I want to do is to teach you backgammon. I'd better go now, you look as pale as a new lover about to meet his beloved for the first time.”

Arrow met me at the garden gate. I sensed some reproach in the way he jumped up on me. I was wrestling with him for the sake of old times when Zakir appeared at the door of the annex. His bowed legs, discolored sweat pants and baggy sweater made him look like a character out of “The Pink Panther.”

“Haluk Bey and Samsun have gone to Ä°zmir on business,” he said. My guess was that his son had plotted this trip in order to leave Sim and I alone.

“And I suppose Bereket and Renk have also gone to the village?”

“They have, I swear on the Koran!”

I imagined the olive trees that leaned back as I passed before them were like the gods of Mount Olympus who turned into forms of vegetation during sacred rites. Before I rang the bell of the stone house I shot a glance through the living-room window: Sim was listening to a small radio on her lap and—I hoped—waiting for me. She sat upright in her armchair as if posing for Banu. She was wearing a beautiful orange and gray dress. She looked as haughty as a model and as vulnerable as an abandoned kitten. I rang the bell determinedly, but had no idea what my opening lines would be. The door opened and I barged in wordlessly and wrapped my arms around her as tightly as I could. My mouth opened to speak, but instead I kissed her.

“I'll never forget that you're a gift to me, Sim,” I said. She leaned her head on my chest, put her arms around me, and started to cry.

I stayed at the stone house for three days, and on the fourth we went to Ayvalık to buy engagement rings. Haluk accompanied us. His expression seemed to say, “I knew from the first glance that this guy would be my son-in-law.” (Do we need to analyze this?) After lunch we all went to the village cemetery. Arrow tried to join the party, so Zakir gladly stayed behind with him: as far as he was concerned, the old suit he wore might as well have been a set of fetters.

It was no surprise to see that the only monument belonged to Nalan. Her epitaph, carved in white marble in the shape of a book, read: