Istanbul Was a Fairy Tale (33 page)

Robert & Lola, Lola & Robert . . . the solitude of two individuals, two individuals who had been able to convince themselves of the fact that they—who had come from different worlds, whose roads would converge—could unite . . . Was that all? I don’t think so. However, in order to understand the story further and to be able to retell it, I had to gain further ground. The authors of the story had desired to perpetuate this march from where they found themselves . . . When they had come back to Istanbul to celebrate the second anniversary of their marriage, the descriptions of their clothes, the nightclubs they frequented, and the room that commanded a panoramic view at the Park Hotel had dazzled his friends. That was the beginning of the legend. He had spoken about big business in London and about the life he was leading there, with the greatest delight. He had been successful in this. Even though he might not have openly said so, he had done his utmost to create in them this image. They contemplated coming to Istanbul more often, to play tennis at the Dağcılık Kulübü and swimming at the Sipahi Ocağı . . . The game had to be played by the book . . . However, these small trips were destined to be rarer and rarer as the years went by, and were to come to an end eventually. It seemed as though their trips to Istanbul had drawn a parallel with the course their relationship followed . . . dwindling to a speck. It would take Monsieur Robert thirty-five years before he could return to the city he had always wanted to abandon, for reasons he could not disclose not even to his next-of-kin, to the city where he was born and which he could not obliterate from his mind. Monsieur Robert would be known to everybody to be living in London or somewhere else in the world . . . in a distant land; the postcards, letters, and money he had sent to Aunt Tilda were proof of this. Was everything as it actually appeared? Indeed, were they exactly as they were known? Breaking with his family was his way of making headway toward the life ahead. For example, he would remain a stranger to the family, to his own small and living family, the family he had fancied to start, remaining a mere appendage despite his passionate love for Lola which the years had not eroded, notwithstanding all sorts of hardships, trials, and challenges overcome for the sake of that love, despite the affection he had shown to Johann for pity’s sake. He would realize that his affection for and temporary attachment to his family were actually frustrating him; he would take cognizance of the real life reflected by the lights of the cosmopolitan city, its buses and its subway, of real life, of himself and of the different aspects of solitude. The nights that Lola and Johann held long conversations behind closed doors were, as he had told me then, the nights he felt himself very lonely, as though forsaken. Was this a sort of betrayal? Those were the nights during which he would let himself be tempted by gambling, during which he would take refuge at gambling tables that would call to him as a sanctuary; those were the nights when he would be their creator, if I may say so. This passion would last for years leading to big gains and big losses . . . sharing the fate of notorious gamblers involving huge sums of money, unforgettable critical moments, intense emotions, vivid recollections. Recklessness was his ruling passion; you could see him fly off the handle, and then suddenly transform into fits of delight the next moment. “A pit was being dug beneath my feet, but I did my best to shut my eyes to it,” he told me one day. It seemed as though he tried to tell of the resentment that betrayal had engendered within him, partly blaming himself for his good will. The tergiversation had not been directed exclusively at Lola and Johann; the family he had left in Istanbul which he considered a last refuge, from which he had never wanted to part and never intended to burn bridges with, had also been involved in this treachery. He had built his life on lies for a good many years and spent many years at gambling tables. Johann would one day leave for America with his girlfriend, relying to a certain extent on the relations he had established in the world of cinema, to see if his luck as a producer would hold. Before he had set out for America, he said: “You’re a very good man. But you made glaring errors in your life, very serious errors. Your biggest mistake has been to marry my mother.” He answered in return: “I couldn’t help it; I was head over heels in love with your mother.” “I know,” replied Johann, “but the fact is that my mother had experienced so many deaths in her lifetime and had lost the capacity to fall in love. She herself had told me this; she must’ve told you as well. That was not difficult to understand. Why haven’t you seen this? Don’t tell me you were blinded by your love for her. We know well that we lie flatly in the name of love; we take refuge in blatant lies, pretending to love. Both of us know this for a fact, even though we are different human beings with different personalities.” Was that the moment to disclose his secret—which even those who knew him closely would place somewhere quite different from where it usually belonged, and share it with others—the secret which he had been carrying for years regarding his matrimonial tie, painstakingly, without hope? Could the talks he might hold from then on enable them to see each other in a different light, relapsing into silence? Who knows? All that he knew was that he could not put into words, despite strenuous efforts, what he actually wanted to convey. It was like the feeling that an individual would experience standing before the door of a person whom he had been yearning to see for a long time, but was incapable of knocking on. Johann would have understood him; he would have been one of the people to whom he could address, convinced that he would get to the bottom of what I would say. I can draw these conclusions because I had been imparted with the secret in question. I was the third person involved at the moment of separation, at a different time of parting. He had finally succeeded: what I had learned would enable me to look at Lola from a different angle, who had carried, throughout her life, the deaths that appeared remote and alien to everybody else. One might call this a kind of nobleness, despite all the pains it involved. One yielded to an intimately related person, to one’s own hell, in the first place. The life that he had led, that he had chosen, had undoubtedly taught him this. This may have been the reason why he expected a reaction to his narrative. A reaction of which he would know nothing, and which, he would feel hidden from, a reaction of which Monsieur Aldo and his family in Istanbul would be ignorant of as well. This secrecy would one day hold true for those he would know in a different climate, as a completely different person. This was the main stipulation in our agreement. Only one question would do; one single question. A question which would take us to another coast, to somebody else’s coast; the rest lying within the precincts of one’s imagination . . . We might venture, for instance, to ask him about the ways he exercised his manhood in trying to understand him a little better. What were the different methods of experiencing one’s virility, of favoring a woman whom one passionately loved and was attached to? Johann might desire to provide an answer to this from the outside, from a different emotional locale. However, they had preferred, like others, to keep silent or to attach meaning to their reticence in different stories. “A person in love never loses hope, without the slightest doubt,” he said, after gazing for a while with a smile. He had merely said this in a murmur, bending his head toward his breast, to the individual he wanted to consider as his own son, but had to leave to tread another path. “You’ve done a lot for me, but I’m turning my back on you,” said Johann after carefully placing the photograph album in his suitcas
e. Then he added: “However, our
élan vital
, the vital force that upholds us is evil, don’t forget that! My mother had nothing to give to another as far as I know. What she needed was affection and love, without giving anything in return: an unrequited love. That’s why I hated her.” A mere smile had been his response to these words. Had his silence originated from his hopelessness or from his inability to give free rein to that suppressed and repressed anger he always tried to conceal? They had to pay dearly for this alliance; they had hung on each other with great force thereafter. That was the only moment when they had experienced friendship and affection. The moment of separation once and for all, they would not even communicate by word of mouth henceforward. Such moments had been experienced by others who knew, and had been obliged to witness, what true separation was and how to survive it. This might, in a way, be considered the call of the wild; the call of the wild that could be transported by other people to other stories by means of original feelings and visions . . . Johann had decided to set out on a path of evil that night. He had had a conversation with his girlfriend who had come to fetch him, and who looked like a fashion model with her elongated umbrella, camel hair mantle, and purple-brown scarf. This was a conversation, during which both interlocutors remained strangers to each other; one of those conversations held when one had nothing better to do; just idle talk, in other words. “America is waiting for us, ready to give us an Oscar,” his girlfriend said, “we’ll be back as soon as we get it.” “Before we have grown old, certainly,” said Johann, “before beginning to look at this city through American glasses . . . ” and they had grown jocular. Yes, everybody was a stranger to everybody. What and who were they laughing at? “Write to me,” said Johann before leaving. “Do write. I mean, if you feel like it.” He added: “Remember me to Susan!” He wished that the Susan to whom this compliment was addressed had been Susan Hayward. A sad smile had appeared on both their faces. Once more they agreed on a common issue and were caught in an unexpected moment. “All right, old man,” said Johann, “I will, if I see her.” These had been his last words; the last words exchanged between them . . . This may have played a part in keeping them in his memory . . .

Could there be fragments of him left in all these words, in these wishes expected to be realized in a foreign country? Could the sentiments that accompanied this last encounter be considered among the true feelings that a father might be willing to convey to his son, despite the distance involved? Errors and human beings . . . He had returned to the stage play, to the scenes he would forever bear in mind; it looked as though he had been caught unawares by the night once again . . . He had meditated on the mistakes he had made in life; he had thought that his life resembled a poorly written play, poorly enacted, and poorly performed. He had gone outside. He had strolled aimlessly in the streets for hours on end, trying to smother those voices within him, paying no attention to the rain pouring down. This was a sight that mirrored what he had been feeling. This event was consistent with what was being experienced. Afterward, he had acted out one of the unforgettable scenes of the play . . . one of the most unforgettable and genuine . . . All alone; despite those ships, those seas, those lands . . . This was the scene in which he was trying to float the ship he had fabricated using a small piece of paper he had taken out of his pocket in that pool at Trafalgar Square. The square was almost deserted in that late hour of the night. It looked as though everybody had taken refuge somewhere. His sister had taught him how to make that ship out of a piece of paper; years ago, when everybody was a child, when Trafalgar Square was but a name in their minds . . . He had watched it drifting and dreamt of ships caught by a storm in vast oceans; the only ship he could have boarded was perhaps a ship made of paper designed to float in the pools that adorned the squares of that city. His gaze had rested quite a while on the ship that the rippling water drifted away. This scene he had also watched in one of the movies which had obsessed him, a movie in which he fancied himself as the star. The film, like all films, was lost to memory. He knew the reason why. “I’d played roulette. It was strange. I bet like mad, and the more I played the more I lost. That night my loss might equal all my losses up until then, I can’t exactly tell you the amount now,” he confided to me, speaking about the experiences of his lonely life. In the morning he had spoken on the phone with Lola, telling her that he intended to leave the house and that they better not see each other again. It was the morning of Johann’s departure. The timing was unfortunate. He might have stayed by her side a little longer, to say the least. However, none of them was in a position to think of such a nicety. They knew all too well that they followed different paths. These were the first steps that would lead Lola, a woman who had seen hard times in other lands and who had lived as a failed hero in many stories, to a psychiatric clinic. As for him, well . . . Thirty-five years have elapsed since then. He was leaving things behind him where they belonged. He had proved to be daring enough to be able to confess to himself the incidents of that morning only later, reassessing them according to the climate in question. He was well aware of the meaning of the steps he took. This was the first and the only victory he had achieved in this relationship. Now he was hard up. He had squandered his money through gambling. He had not given up his conviction that he would continue loving Lola passionately despite all the adversities he had gone through, that a time would come when he would be pursuing her as he had done in his youth, that wherever she would go, he would be on the trail . . . Those little victories had not been in vain. This might get him nearer to the reality in the mirror. How eccentric certain people were, how versatile were their relationships, and how mercurial were the forms they assumed, quite different from their actual image. One is inclined to ask for instance who would be the person or the image one would have liked to cling to when one felt that the days one lived and one had been obliged to live were drifting away. He had asked himself this question when he had moved to a district remote from those illuminated quarters of the city; he had tried to find an answer, what image, what person? Certain places had occupied his mind in particular. During the days when everything was in order, or seemed to be, he had asked, in one of the outlying districts quite removed from where his life was spent, the illuminated life he spent had appeared to him in a completely different aspect. In the meantime, everything had changed: the nights, the streets, the odors, and the faces. There was still the possibility of glorious days. Yes, those days might still be saved. Over the course of one of those days he had found the opportunity of being engaged by prominent concerns as an adviser, as he was well informed about the world’s coffee market. Yes, an adviser . . . at least temporarily, during the days when he had not severed himself completely from that life. He had to keep up appearances. His companions in the offices where he worked never knew that he lived in an outlying district. He had told them that he had been put up at the The Grosvenor Hotel. He had prepared everything. The aged receptionist by the name of Mr. Jefferson, whom everybody knew and who resembled a nobleman, whose life had been spent in manor houses, with his accent, demeanor, and poised behavior, was a close acquaintance of his. Mr. Jefferson was one of those gentlemen who knew the meaning of a life lived in resignation. In this section of the story, he had to behave assuming such an identity . . . appearing solely in this identity . . . This must have been the reason which aroused in some the desire to probe for a closer look. The game was an old one, if one considered these points. For instance, nobody should know that he had lived elsewhere in other stories. They had met at an Italian café near the hotel. It was a holiday . . . a holiday during an ordinary weekday. They were in their ordinary attire and spoke without mincing their words. They exuded warmth; years had passed since they had cemented their friendship. Mr. Jefferson had asked him why he had been absent so long from the evening teas. He had told him simply that days had elapsed, had removed him more and more to the furthest corners of the city, to a London that looked alien to him. He was no longer the same old Monsieur Robert . . . Then he had added that he had felt the need to carry on the struggle, to experience that sentiment, at least. He desired to preserve the Monsieur Robert that other people did not know, the one they could not and would not be able to perceive. Mr. Jefferson had told him that much could be done for the said Monsieur Robert, for the sake of the good old days, and that one should believe in the many ways to deal with exile. They were seated at a table in a café in the proximity of the hotel. The coffee odor mingled with the scent of fresh buns . . . It was morning . . . a morning no different from any other morning, even though certain mornings dawned reminding one of other horizons, or gave one such an impression at least . . . He had kept his promise and did his best for Monsieur Robert, who tried to refresh those mornings. Mr. Jefferson’s task was to tell those who asked that Monsieur Robert was out for a meeting and wasn’t expected back for a long time, and that, should they care to leave a note, he would be only too glad to deliver it to him as soon as he was back. Mr. Jefferson had also informed the night attendants of the scheme. To keep up appearances as much as possible was
de rigueur
. It may be that those moments were his last; he had desired to communicate them, to make them tangible, at least. Their encounter had taken place at least in one of the acts of the play . . . in their identities as two honest individuals . . . as two individuals who believed they had found the truth in their little lies . . . that might befit a revolt to those who could risk to rebel . . . then . . . then they were to disappear nonetheless. One day, at a time when the ‘then’ had a quite different meaning for me, at a time when I was trying to allot the roles my actors were to play, I went to The Grosvenor Hotel. I was led to London guided by the memory of a person who had been instrumental in making me live a night which would stay with me forever, which would gesticulate the death of a part of me. As for gambling, it was a glaring error, a suicide, let alone being a sin, throwing oneself down a chasm in all consciousness. Madame Roza’s formulation of this sentence—based on a platitude, on a well-known point of view and on an understanding supplied by experience by his beloved elder sister—was the typified expression of a great many people left with diversified sentiments and a multitude of experiences. Throwing oneself headlong down a chasm . . . Was the problem related, in any way, to the storm raised at those tables, to the failure to take stock of this fall and to the connivance of it? To a secret pleasure derived from the severance with Lola’s small family? He had never been willing to provide an answer to this question; he would never be able to do so.