Istanbul Was a Fairy Tale (26 page)

Two years had passed before I realized that I could not leave Anita’s memory there at the night of the recital, that my feelings had not misled me. I encountered her on a sad wedding night I would be fain to tell someone of when the time came, with expectations of a different sort mingled with misgivings. The wedding ceremony was taking place in the halls of a residential hotel overlooking the sea in Istanbul. Yet, there was death in the air. This death had been felt by everybody that night; they had been compelled to feel it . . . I had run into her as I was sneaking out to the lobby to avoid dancing. She wasn’t surprised to see me; at least she didn’t appear to be. She seemed to consider this encounter a natural occurrence. That meeting was never far away for her, as a matter of fact it had always been coming. Everything was so easy, so natural . . . Had the interval of time that had passed been so brief, or were we two old friends who had shared many incidents, visions and experiences? Why not, after all? She had not thought it fitting to ask how I was and what I had been doing over the course of the last two years. It seemed as though those two years had not existed at all. There was no other time in-between. “We’ve come to listen to Metin,” she said with a faint smile, as if she had to justify her presence there, “he’s a wonderful talent.” Metin was a singer who sang oldies that nobody listened to in the nightclub of that hotel to the accompaniment of a piano he played himself; sometimes, he also played the hits of the day. Songs to remember the past and to enjoy the present, not for the mere sake of entertainment, not for those who exhibit to others that they enjoy the moment, but songs meant for those who wanted to see themselves in that fictive moment as individuals who had failed to realize their dreams. What I was observing was not the Anita from the Chopin recital. Her looks seemed to have withdrawn from the world in which she lived or seemed to have lived, while the heavy makeup of her eyes had given her a grotesque appearance. Only the looks differed. Could it be that behind the apparent naturalness there lay a concealed uneasiness, regret and the effort to cover up defeat? Only years later would I be able to provide an answer to this question . . . Certain explanations were required like in many other relationships. No sooner had you touched the story concretely than you were faced with someone who was puzzling to you. You might call this a belief, a firm belief in an answer despite all that you knew yourself to be true. This question would breed another for which I could provide no answer, a question that I was to shun ever after. This encounter might have taken place at an unexpected moment, at an undesired moment probably—a belated encounter. Had it been an ephemeral source of hopefulness for Anita, this narration of events, this utterance? Maybe. However, the answer to this must have remained in the custody of Anita forever; this fact I must acknowledge at present. All that I can remember is the fact that I had not been in a position to say all that I had wanted to say. I had been caught unawares by someone I knew all too well would occupy an important place in my life; I was at a loss to do the right thing and I feared a confrontation, a real confrontation. Had I tried to take the necessary step, would it be to any avail? The fact that up until now I have not been able to return to that moment in my mind must explain my state of despair at the time. I believe that Anita had recognized my despair, she must have sensed it. Thus, we were following parallel tracks. There are certain relationships bound to remain prohibited and proscribed despite all probabilities and longings that cannot be materialized. This was a chance to allow one to take refuge with the help of bad timing. At the least expected moment, we had come across each other once again, shaken hands and ventured to engage in a little dialogue with an exchange of looks and words, the meaning of which we would realize years later. However, this communication was restricted to a limited number of glances and words, which I still recall. Anything more than that was not possible at the time. Before we parted, she had shaken my hand, squeezing it tightly. “Aren’t they pleasant, these songs?” she commented afterward. I was to learn the real truth much later, years later, from Juliet as I was about to run away from a celebration. “Anita had been sick, very sick,” Juliet said. As we continued talking, I had tried to alter the course of our conversation to reflect upon those moments, and, what is more important still, to those looks, benefiting by force of circumstance from the place where we stood in the milieu. She added: “She could not satisfy her sexual hunger. She consulted psychologists and psychiatrists but without satisfactory results. Perhaps those whom she had consulted with were not the right people. You will not believe it, but her father made the supreme sacrifice at times to find for her a male partner through remuneration . . . ” I cannot express what I felt at the time even today. It was a feeling similar to a person’s smothered impulse to shriek into a nightmare, it was as though one wanted to take a step back but was prevented from doing so. Anita’s specter wandered through me. She had the same experience; she had the same nightmare, which she had tried to convey through her looks. We were surrounded by a crowd of people whose voices we could not hear or perceive despite their proximity because of our unwillingness to leave in the first place. Our distance from those people was due perhaps to our own deportment. Their skyline was our skyline, their remoteness our remoteness and their approach our approach. “Why didn’t you say so before?” I asked her, all the original, double and hidden meanings and potentialities considered. I had tried my best not to display the shattering within me. This was a kind of bringing her to account, a sort of protest, a protest against my own self in the first place . . . Juliet had recognized it. “But you didn’t ask, did you?” she said. “I knew instinctually that you’d be impressed by her. As a matter of fact, the attraction proved to be mutual. You weren’t apathetic toward each other, that was evident. Her sickness was not so serious at the time. A love affair might have been a cure for her; as a matter of fact, both of you were in need of it. You knew it damn well, yet you were reluctant to take the step required.” After a short silence she added: “Anyhow, you wouldn’t have understood this at the time even if I had told you.” “You think I can now?” I asked. “True,” she said, “it’s not so easy. So, we kept what secrets we had to ourselves. Not many people knew about her condition. However, if anyone should have, it should’ve been you!” To believe that such a life could be carried on, to resign oneself to this fate . . . In saying this, I’d wanted to put the story into words, written every day anew; the layers of loneliness that go into a story are far beyond Juliet’s comprehension. One was not able to share one’s despair for the sake of generating a little hope. I was to experience this in my other relationships, because of various worries that were connected in various degrees to cowardice. Nevertheless, I couldn’t possibly share such feelings with Juliet at the time. In order to be able to take certain steps toward someone would need some preparation. Have I not already said that in order to be able to describe certain painful experiences one should have experienced them fully themselves? That was the reason why I had wanted to know Anita’s whereabouts, I believe. I could manage to say a few words, if not everything . . . “They went to Israel some five years ago. Anita wanted to settle at a
kibbutz
,” Juliet said. “When we paid a visit to them to wish them farewell she spoke with a palpitating heart of a
kibbutz
that the Rumanian Jews had set up.” After a pause, she added with a voice that betrayed a longing mingled with some discomfort: “The fact is her bed-ridden mother whom she had not seen since her childhood was breathing her last breaths . . . Before she went, she had expressed a wish to see her daughter first and then her husband who had caused her so much suffering. How she managed to do this, how she managed to get in touch with them, we’ll never know.” It may be that Anita’s father corresponded secretly with his wife behind her back. It may be that they had lied; it may be that they had recourse to lie like everybody else.

Lies, deceptions . . . resolutions, options, or letting oneself go to be swept up by the whirlwind of human relations. What could have led Anita to such a life? Was it the absence of her mother, her desire to be a mother to someone else in the absence of her own, or to take vengeance on all motherhood despite other people’s opposition, by killing a part of herself gradually? Or was it her failure to carry the burden of her uncomely appearance in whose beauty she could never bring herself to believe? Whither and how far could justifications that I could conjure up in my imagination take me? It was certainly not so easy to understand certain lives and relationships properly in their true light and to fit them into our dreams of those people . . . All that I know and can say is that she was carried along within me in an unexpected night, for other nights despite Anita’s absence and her disappearance in human form. After the lapse of many years I was fated to come across the piano player Metin quite by chance at a music hall and hold a conversation with him that was to last for several hours, during which he suggested to me to set out on a new journey at the break of dawn, once the night ended. He had not forgotten Anita; what’s more he had reserved a special corner in his life for her. As our talk dragged on, I better understood the fact that those days had been very important to him, and so I had to navigate them with caution, on my way toward a life mislaid somewhere. A boundary had been set for me that I was not supposed to transgress. Perhaps, this is the reason why I’m now at pains to define the truths, the real truths involved in that story. The fact is that she was not ill at all. Under the circumstances I had to proceed. A young girl pimped by her father to tourists stinking of money. The young girl was helpless; she was being dragged toward a chasm. How did this happen, such a corrupt practice? Everybody would, no doubt, have their own opinion on the matter. Metin thought that they were both in need of money. That was certainly a way of putting a bold face on betrayal, a way of living and experiencing a betrayal through another. He had done his best to pull her out from this shame. But he himself could not stray beyond the boundary fixed to him. That young girl in despair who was ready to take up the invitation of a person who would truly love her concealed in her heart an evil unabated, an evil she nourished. This was a ruse which enabled her not to forget that betrayal, trying to attract people to her like a spider by putting on innocent airs. No doubt these were conflicting feelings and observations. This process of passing judgment might be the result of the efforts made to fit the remaining pieces of information into their places—making a sacrifice, declaring one’s love, expressing one’s deep affection, the submission to and justification of her revolt against humanity through a baser existence—on the one hand, and on the other hand, it can be seen as an evil worse than death. I had to lend an ear both to Juliet and to Metin. The story was getting unfathomable. But which intelligence reflected the truth? What did Anita actually want to convey to me by her looks, mysterious airs, and reticence? Why had the mother gone to that distant land? Did Juliet know other things she had left unsaid, that she preferred to remain quiet about? If there was something that had to be kept secret or that required hiding, could one assume that all that had been experienced, in one way or another, have some connection to me? Could it be that that woman, consigned to memory, was a figment of one’s imagination, of a dream desired to be kept fresh in one’s recollection? After all, a woman—a woman who had veiled herself to me in this story—had given birth to Anita. What was of particular importance was finding out the whereabouts of that woman, and sensing her presence. A friend of mine had told me once that in many relationships, especially sexual ones, we were gratified only through delusions. He was in AA. He had been involved in the prostitution trade. He had something to say about delusions, illusions, and hallucinations, about psychedelic experiences, to anybody who wished to hear. Now that I’m trying to see and know Anita better, the Anita in my life, with my restricted means, as I remember once more the history of what has not been told and shared, I feel that what are given to us in a relationship are but illusions. She is no more, I know this; she will never show up in this vicinity, she will live henceforth only in words to be fed by fancy. All that has been experienced, the traces left indicate that we will never be able to embark on certain adventures for lack of courage and we will hurt certain individuals who have not deserved to receive such harsh treatment. We lose those people, our own people, because of this cowardice. Our trying to keep pace with the powerful, with those who seem to be winners, may, I think, be explained by the fact that we prefer not to face our selves, the evil that is lying within us . . . evil or simply our vanity. Whenever I recall Anita, perhaps for this very reason, it occurs to me to narrate quite a different love story. However, love requires sacrifice despite occasional quarrels. I am still at a loss to give a name to what I may have felt for Anita. Those were other times, and there were things that I could not touch at those times. They say that there are certain flowers that grow only on mountains, on the heights, that there is a flower peculiar to every altitude. These are flowers which have exotic smells, flowers that I have never touched since I have never been to those mountains. I keep on promising myself that I will climb those mountains one day, knowing that they are there and will be there forever. The reason for our procrastination, and for our gradual and continual loss of those moments . . . the reason, both delusion and illusion . . . despite regeneration, is that we lose the flowers of those places, of those places dreamt of, due to the transience of nature. While someone is perpetually lost somewhere, one wishes to believe that that person stands there and will stand there forever. The sense of touch becomes that of other people and is lost to you forever as you put off your journey to the mountains. In another sense, you diminish, as you postpone your departure and set foot in a story gradually dwindling away. What remains behind is the smile of those who know those flowers. It is not for nothing that I associate the experiences I would have wished to have had with Anita with those mountains and their flora. The flower seemed to be somewhere there. To take a few steps would be sufficient . . . That’s why I wanted to describe Anita as she appeared to me. The image I had of her, the image that had been imprinted on my mind . . . permeated with suspicions, regrets, and unanswered questions . . . Love requires a sacrifice, first and foremost. Leaving aside the gains and the losses, the gist of the matter lay, I think, in the fact that Anita had not encountered a true lover that could make such a sacrifice for her. I believe Metin had also understood this. There was a song among the hundreds in his registry which he had not sung, the song that he could not spare for Anita. The tears that trickled down his cheeks in referring to the past could not have been merely due to the effect of alcohol. We had run into each other at a time of regret . . . How can I otherwise explain our reluctance to meet each other again?