Read Istanbul Was a Fairy Tale Online
Authors: Mario Levi
Monsieur Jacques, in that world that had been presented to him, whose doors had been opened wide and gifted to him, had done his utmost, according to some, to pay his debt—his
wergild
. He had assumed all the responsibility, maintenance and care that Olga had been in need of, when she was left alone and impecunious after her father’s death, in a way more generous and magnanimous than others of his ilk. What drew them to each other at the beginning was this generosity; she was a woman who knew how to listen to her feelings and knew how to convey them to others. Certain particularities had not been omitted; nothing had been spared from her. Monsieur Jacques had always acted as a gentleman when he presented her with gifts he had bought on the occasions of her birthdays, accompanied by the gentle and kind words he pronounced as he tended them to her. He had never adopted such a manner in all his life to any woman in this way, he had never looked nor could he ever look at other women like he looked at her. His was not a transitory affair; far from being transient, he looked at this affair in a different vein. There were things that were out of the ordinary in this relationship, things that had their roots in daily life. I myself had been the witness of many things that had served me to make inroads into this story. Olga, who took care of all the clients at the shop and knew all the dealings of the business, open or secret, was the only true friend and confidante Monsieur Jacques had. Among those who had had an inkling of this circumstance was Uncle Kirkor. It occurs to me sometimes that when considering his star-crossed relationship with Olga, one should take stock of the implications of such a fact. For, Uncle Kirkor knew all too well the extent to which he had confidence in her. I attribute the impression Olga had on him to her womanhood and the special role she played, and surmise that, as I had good knowledge of her, that it deserved consideration. There was, however, a corner into which she could never have access, as it constituted a source of jealousy, the point where one had the impression that the companionship had been usurped from another. When one thinks of the potential contributions of this little defeat to the unattainability of that woman and her preference for the person in question, the problem is liable to assume a more intricate character. This confidentiality might have been generated perhaps by the inevitable preferences related to backgrounds to which Uncle Kirkor may have been blind. The fact that Olga had learned to speak Spanish and that she had succeeded in this, even though she acquired a somewhat funny accent, was noteworthy. Yet, despite all these probabilities, this confidence appears to have had another meaning, difficult to share and to express. Berti had been spared this confidence—yes, even Berti. A confidence discovered in the forbidden zone of Monsieur Jacques, a confidence loath to be deprived of and related to ‘that thing’ . . . Olga also had certainly taken cognizance of it. Her putting up with such a life of hardships despite all her destitution and unrealized fancies could have been possible only by such an unshakable conviction. This conviction had also led her to accept those furtive nights, those concrete nights which revived in her the hope that she could go on living her former life in Odessa separately and continue to tread a path strewn with different sentiments. The hours of separation during those nights were charged with new faces, for many years ahead . . . up until those interminable days and nights during which Madame Roza had suffered the intense agonies caused by cancer . . . “That my mother-in-law was doomed to die was as known to her as to everybody else. He had wanted to be near her in her last days. Not because of a pang of conscience, though. I think that he had understood how much he loved her, how difficult it would be to separate from her,” said Juliet . . . There was some effort to protect her, I believe; an attempt at shelter and preservation; one of those stories ever recurrent, having inevitable parallels. Monsieur Jacques regarded Madame Roza on her deathbed with a sense of gratitude beyond what had been experienced in the said tripartite relationship, beyond the things that had been occasioned, the things that caused the opportunity to slip, with a sense of gratitude in a place quite different from that which one would have guessed. Experiencing such a feeling was not easy. Madame Roza, according to the information we had been imparted with, had, by her resoluteness, a guarded speech and mastery in keeping silent, having succeeded in thwarting that love, preventing it being fostered and consummated to the very end by a self-sacrifice that not many women (who had been aware of it) could bear the brunt thereafter. This had most probably been interpreted as a game, a game that both women had been privy to, but had refrained from speaking of, or alluding to, during their confidential talks. It all boiled down to a conflict of interests. A conflict that also necessitated some reserve . . . In the end, everybody had paid their share of the cost of this forbidden love in his or her own way. This situation could not possibly have brought about and nourished that feeling. This sentiment of Monsieur Jacques was one that was in the offing, at a distance from what had been experienced. His wife had looked after his mother during the last five years of her life; his mother who had to live with eyes closed to the world, not like a daughter-in-law, but like a daughter. Yes, like her own daughter; it’s true, like the progeny of one’s own family. By self-sacrifice, endurance, willful deprivation and joining Nesim’s game wholeheartedly, careful not to let her take wind of the deceptions she had been subjected to. By that stratagem, Madame Roza had also spent some effort to come to the rescue of the house, notwithstanding her solitude, reticence and lack of means. For the sake of stories which found their repeated depths through acquired meaning in their echoes . . . Monsieur Jacques was the sort of person who believed that debts, regardless of their origin, good or bad, had to be settled in this world. Had he ever thought about this philosophy of his which so profoundly affected his life during the days he had been looking after his wife? I don’t know. As far as I can remember, the frequency of visits to Olga had been reduced to a minimum. If my memory does not fail me, this had lasted for about six months. Madame Roza had died while holding the hand of Monsieur Jacques, clasping it tightly . . . her last breath, the last curtain . . . saying: “It has been difficult, hasn’t it?” Monsieur Jacques was sitting by her bed not saying a word. He closed her eyelids and recited a last prayer. He continued to sit there for a long while, thinking of their life together; the very first days of their marriage; Jerry; the night of the blaze in which their house at Halıcıoğlu had burned down; his father and the first dinner they had before their nuptials. He remembered the celery in oil dressed with too little sugar and too much salt. It was not that good, yet they had eaten it. As he was telling about that moment of separation, Monsieur Jacques was especially moved when he shared the recollection of that celery. He felt as though he was re-experiencing it, a joy mingled with pain. This was a feeling to which affection and yearning added seasoning, a tragic moment turned into a nice and delightful memory after the lapse of many years. Such recollections only return to the integral part of one’s life. They may even arouse in one a sort of pride. For they represent one’s own true moments. For instance that recollection of the celery dish, that surmised the moment of eternity which had severed Monsieur Jacques from the woman with whom he had spent an entire life. Monsieur Jacques had long gazed at Madame Roza. He had wanted to speak a few words to her. Certain words that he expected might alleviate the burden of this separation. However, he had failed to do so. He could not bring himself to do that. It was too late. He then took up her comb from the night table and began to comb her thinning hair, comparing it to her hair when he had first seen her. He c
ombed it meticulously and gently, in order that she might go decently to her last refuge . . . Then he had stopped. For it seemed that this sense of absurdity encapsulated the moment. Certain things, certain things that delineate your life graze past without having been experienced. “It has been difficult, hasn’t it?” Madame Roza said before closing her eyes, just before her husband started combing her hair. The one that had remained behind had no choice other than to remember, while the other experienced an intense journey through time and space. A long time had been spent; lives, places, seasons heavy with different meanings and little stories had passed. These were the years that would gladden neither Monsieur Jacques nor Olga for reasons easily guessed, the years missed so to speak; what was interesting, and, if one may confess, distressing, was, Olga’s sudden death one night, after having gone through a dreadful ordeal, all alone, in her bed, about six months after Madame Roza. Indeed, Olga had died about six months after Madame Roza, all alone, without a word to anybody! Yes, all alone! In the company of her tales; befitting the life she had lived . . . All of a sudden, lapsing into silence, without raising hue nor cry . . . Without having experienced that togetherness with the man she had been waiting for and to whom she had remained faithful to even in her older days, having been trespassed by no one. Was this a sort of vengeance taken by Madame Roza in such an unexpected manner, so difficult for anybody to imagine? Maybe. What was certain was Monsieur Jacques’ regression and withdrawal into the solitude of himself. Monsieur Jacques, whom I’d seen at the luncheon we had had at Juliet’s after the funeral service of Madame Estreya, fitted this caricature . . . Waiting was of no use, no doubt nobody would come, neither Olga, nor Roza, nor Kirkor, nor Jerry, nor any other soul . . . If so, why should one insist on looking at that old clock?
Mimico’s marbles
In everybody’s life there are days, nights and seasons that seem to have been left behind at different places far in the past. These are experiences and recollections that make you what you actually are, that at a least expected moment cause you in your depths to meet people whom you never expected to meet, that you remember occasionally not always with compunction but sometimes with joy, and that return to you having assumed different meanings. I would never have thought in the beginning that that photograph I chanced to see in an album tossed in a corner at Juliet’s would have paved the way to a story destined to be shared with certain people. It was a thick album with a green cover and black pages, an album heavy enough to befit the seriousness of certain situations. It happened to be in the cabinet of the LPs, played less and less at this stage. Lucho Gatica was there . . . Harry Bellafonte, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby and Elvis Presley were all present. Songs kept receding into the past, one-time hits that sounded less and less familiar, songs that people no longer wanted to listen to, to preserve; among them was an album whose contents received less and less attention . . . People sometimes try to evade certain memories and recollections, certain voices, sounds and words that may remind them of certain memories . . . I had, with some hesitation, taken up that album, since this approach might also bring people together through shared memories to which one was a stranger. Juliet had observed this. She had given me a hint by her looks that I shouldn’t be upset. This was not the first silent communication between us. There are more ways of exchanging information in life, through other jargons, than words and looks. Juliet’s wink was a sort of little present, a sort of
laissez-passer
. She knew that I liked to head for other people’s psyches, despite my uneasiness to be proceeding on and finding out the traces of other people’s mislaid consciousness. Actually, it was not possible to properly reach those people figuring in the photographs; I was conscious of this. These dashed hopes were not exclusive to people whom we traced as outsiders, but the same frustrated hope held true for people with whom we had lived with over a long period of time, for people we had had contact with for one reason or another. Nevertheless, I had my own fantasies and stories to concoct despite the lack of prospects, stories that seemed never to come to an end thanks to my fancies that engendered and obliterated them, stories that helped me to take refuge in my lies once again in the face of the attacks launched by the truth. Photographs were meticulously arranged on the first few pages while seeming to have been haphazardly laid out on the ones that followed. It seemed that after a given point they had wanted to give up the idea, to renounce certain things and places, as though they had had enough of them. It looked like something that one tried to carry out as if under coercion, something that one would have liked to let go and run its course . . . Photographs loosely distributed without having been glued properly in order; photographs haphazardly inserted by the dozen among the pages. The photograph that had directed me to that story happened to be among those clusters. Its size was somewhat larger than the rest. The dimensions made it easily distinct. It seemed that in it there was one of those calls that we preferred not to define but instead chose to remain contented with through simply sensing its presence. After the lapse of such a long time I can fit that call now in its proper place. It was a place between understanding and bewilderment; a zone between comprehension and perplexity . . . For, I know more or less the unforgettable moments of that story. Having covered some distance among certain impressions, one feels compelled to penetrate the body of a different being; otherwise you feel that you will not be in a position to tell of some of your experiences. At such moments, there are realities more important than the fact that you know you cannot always disclose your feelings as you would have liked. That is the place that you should be attaching importance, in particular to those things that have given birth to them within you. I think I can explain the difference between the moment when I first glanced at that photograph and this very moment, only in this way . . . Most of the details seem to have been obliterated from my memory. What I had been beholding was, to the best of my understanding, a revelry wherein wine occupied the place of honor. There may have been a musical performance as well; a musical performance whose echoes have by now receded to such a distance in the past that the figures in the photograph and their viewers can no longer hear them. That night, more than any other, future designs must have constituted the main topic of discussion. This was not a far-fetched supposition. A wish that had remained confined to the glasses stretched in the air, hopes nourished with succinct words. Will tomorrow be more beautiful than yesterday? Who knows? Given the fact that one had come so far . . . Only the goblets replete with wine could be noticed . . . What remained were the vestiges of other stories, and views that had accompanied them. Three men smartly dressed up in dinner suits and three women wearing low-cut dresses in the fashion of the day had fixed their looks at some place in this scene of bliss they had created in the name of progress within their lives. A place they wished to magnify, and, to a certain extent, to pause, having come from different worlds, carrying those different worlds within themselves . . . I was familiar with these photographs. I had been on either side of them. That was partly the reason why I had been so inquisitive about what remained concealed behind those glances. Was it a summer night? “It was a banquet. Jenny, a cousin of Berti with whom we had lost contact was getting engaged . . . She was a close friend of mine. Formerly, we would often see each other, even before we came to know Berti. We had so many things in common; our fantasies, you know . . . Like everybody . . . Then they parted . . . the day before the wedding. Jenny seemed happy that night. She believed she had found the man of her dreams . . . Look how she laughs!” said Juliet. She pointed to a fair woman who directed her languid look into the camera. She was holding a man with glossy hair by the hand. Were you to ask if there was more to see than what was presented in the photograph, you might call this attitude not holding but hanging on . . . to hold onto someone, to desire to hold on . . . When you think of those latent fears within you, of that man you want to shun at times, you want to have perfect confidence and belief in certain happiness . . . to believe in happiness to the very end, to feel such a need, especially if your experiences and efforts have not received the attention they deserved; as if they summon you to an ineluctable solitude against your will . . . There was in that photograph something that recalled one of the prohibitions, reminding one of who had been ostracized. Had the families, whose desire it had been to show their happiness at such nights, been left outside the frame of that photograph, or had they been outside the confines of the night that brought me that photograph? Would the failure reinforce a prohibition, preserve its strength and cause such a separation? This was a probability not to be easily overlooked in the families of those involved. But I, in order to get an answer to my question, and in my hope to find another story, had chosen a new path and tried to learn if behind that smile there may have been a lover that wished to be forgotten, but with whom it had been impossible to part. How could I ever know if my question, whose origin might well have been a strange intuition, would have led me to that place I least expected it to . . . “Yes, but . . . It didn’t turn out as you expected. The man had kept up his facade until the last moment. He had stuck to his guns; he had had good will and desire for another life; although he had to give it up in the end and confess everything. He had his own sexual preferences . . . There had been quite a scandal at Büyükada during those days. Jenny had loved Morris . . . Once the truth was made public, she shut herself up at home. It took some time before she returned to normal. Then, we heard one day that she had decided to go to İzmir, to her aunt. Before she left, we sat one day at a patisserie . . . She said she was going to start a new life. She had decided to become a tour guide. She spoke English and French. Her intention might well have materialized. But not a year had gone by before she was back. She changed jobs every now and then; she slept with men. She felt restless and changed places all the time. She wanted to forget and seemed to wreak vengeance on fate . . . In time, we lost contact. Much later, I heard that she had married a widower with two children from İzmir, much older than herself. She had invited no one to her wedding. She seemed to be taking refuge in evasion, as though she were afraid of something. That was the last I saw of her. Eventually she had left for İzmir for good. She never returned to Istanbul. She may have, however, although unbeknownst to us. We received a letter from her.” Juliet penned in the said letter in which she spoke of her having found the happiness she had been looking for. However, she had left her sentence incomplete . . . There seemed to be something that she was shying away from, something between two people which might have changed the course of the story. She might have desired to keep a particular thing to herself she had suddenly remembered at the least expected moment. This must have been the reason for her preferring to keep silent and lending her ears to others. She had h
ad a faint smile on her face afterward and said: “Jenny was a very beautiful girl; much more beautiful than she appears in this photograph. Sometimes she undid her hair; such flaxen hair was rarely seen. Her eyes were of amber. Her smile exposed all her teeth, which were replicas of pearls. This isn’t so apparent in this photograph. She was happy all right, but that night she looked somewhat different. Had you known her, you were sure to fall head over heels in love with her.” She loved to tease me now and then and to play the role of the elder sister. Despite our differing views on life and how it should be lived, this was what had endeared her to me. This approach had a dash of sex appeal seasoned with affection. On that Saturday, when we had gradually sneaked into that photograph, this affection, innate in her, was directed toward Jenny rather than toward me. It was a rainy Saturday afternoon . . . It might have occurred to Juliet to transpose Jenny for a short moment to another point in time and allow her to be shared with another person . . . “For what? For whom?” . . . Yes, for what and for whom? Was it in order to review once again, from another angle, the steps taken or not taken and the places reached over the years that had vanished in the meantime? Maybe so. Would you not be disposed now and then to retain some photographs for this purpose, to keep them in your own drawers? It had occurred to me to learn if there was somewhere else in that album Jenny had not put in an appearance with that smile of hers. I knew, however, that I couldn’t ask this of those people, from the heroes of those tales. I had to acknowledge the fact that certain people who had put in an appearance for a certain term in our lives and left their imprints on us were doomed to remain confined to those photographs. What was important was to just lightly touch on those facades, making sure not to impair anything, and to learn how to touch them in this way. A light touch . . . in order to be able to place that moment somewhere never to be forgotten . . . It looked as if this was the most critical, the most sensitive point of the story. The spell should be broken on no account. Barring all sentiments and contingencies, how much could you share the photograph of that moment with the person who had experienced it, especially when so many years had already gone by? I’d felt this uneasiness when I had taken the album in my hand, and when I’d tried to touch other photographs and had dared to proceed to other periods of that history. In my intention to abandon Jenny at that moment, in that photograph, and my attempt to reanimate her with what Juliet had provided me with, there was a reason, a need for a justifiable evasion. The other hero of the story—who had experienced another evasion, a true evasion, or who had had to go through it—seemed to have the intention of speaking to me about another adventure. I could not possibly ignore the drawbacks of listening to Juliet’s account—she who had stayed aloof of Morris, that eccentric man, because of his maltreatment of Jenny, who had experienced the communal spaces from which he could not tear himself away. Clues might have led me to a different aperture. Well, we could also try to overlook certain probabilities while we were trying to understand those men for the sake of the legacy of those pains left to us. I had tried to reveal this aspect of the story which gave me a thrill I tried to conceal partly because of this. Those feelings could not be disclosed easily in those places; for, from time to time you chose to hide yourself behind a different appearance. Juliet had felt that uneasiness I expected. As though caught unawares, she had taken a sip from her coffee with milk and cream and exhaled a few puffs from her cigarette. This behavior was important; for, she knew all too well how to benefit from such occasions. These were occasions when her breath smelled strongly of tobacco. This characteristic of hers excited me sexually . . . “Our contact had broken off for quite some time up until the moment I ran into her at Büyükada. We were at a café, in one of those lousy cafés. She had a man with her, a young man of fair complexion. They were at a distance of a few meters from me. I couldn’t hear their words; however, it was evident that they conversed in English. From the expressions on their faces one could infer that they were discussing something serious. Now and then they stopped talking and turned their heads towards the sea. I think I was the only one to recognize her. She had changed a lot. She had grown fat and her hair had grown sparse. However, she was well dressed. Our eyes met a couple of times. She did not seem to recognize me, or preferred not to. Had I approached her, would she be disposed to talk with me? I think she would. I mean she would have liked to. Anyway, I regret now not having tried. However, something within me thwarted my intended action, I don’t know exactly what; something that had to do with me, I should think. There was one other thing . . . I didn’t figure there, in the picture, I mean . . . I think I’d felt this then. We’d become strangers to each other . . . ” We were going through times when eccentricities recalled other eccentricities . . . “You happened to figure in other stories . . . She couldn’t have done likewise. As far as I could gather, she was not given enough space. She may have desired more than what was afforded her from that experience of deception for lack of being properly understood. I’m not very far from this feeling. The affection within me was not any different from the meaning we usually attach to the word ‘affection.’ I’m sure of this. I think that the problem was her inability to express this affection in a way satisfactory to her friends,” I said; whereupon, she said: “Yes, but she had on her countenance a sort of self-assurance which the indifference she had grown accustomed to provided her with. She seemed to have settled everything with the people who had abandoned her to her solitude, with those people of the world from which she had been estranged. Her indifference and alienation might have been partly due to this . . . Then we heard one day that she had killed herself . . . They said that she could not bear the fact that her lover had abandoned her and gone back to his own country. That day the subject they discussed might’ve been this . . . ” she said. Speaking of avoidance, I think I had wanted to allude also to other types of evasions. I had felt it; Juliet had tried to evade not only Jenny but also Morris. To evade, feeling the need to run away from different lives to shelter in others for the sake of refuge . . . This was not being experienced for the first time, or for the last. There were so many people who based their existence on such evasions. This story would, over time, continue in a quite different fashion and pave the way to another tale. I already knew that this was going to be the case, at noon during our Saturday retreat. But I’d have to wait, or I’d have to learn how to wait. The hot toasts baked in the oven with cheese were as delicious as always. I had had a sip from the coffee with cream. She was a master in this; she knew how to create the right atmosphere. That was one of the two houses wherein I savored milk with delight. It would still take some time before I realized the importance of this characteristic. Some time . . . Once everybody had come and gone . . . I had gazed at her face in the photograph. I had thought the years had made her even more beautiful. She looked despondent, but her countenance had become more meaningful. She had grown old. Berti also had changed. Then, reverting to the couple opposite, and pointing to the man whose looks attracted attention and gave him an ostentatious appearance among the other six figures, I had remarked: “How everything eludes him; his dinner jacket, the woman beside him, you yourself, this banquet . . . ” And she had said in response with a mirthless smile: “He is Mimico, his real name was Hayim, but we used to cal