Istanbul Was a Fairy Tale (54 page)

Who did you invite to the wedding banquet?

A voice was concealed that evening and the morning that followed, a voice which would give the meaning of rain a stronger resonance in my memory. My recollections of Berti and Juliet’s wedding day had left within me the traces of an unfinished story. Those traces can still lead me to a few distant people . . . the individuals of that Sunday morning had been conducted to me at different times—different people to figure in that play. What are left to me now are my words, simply my words. Voices get mingled. Certain visions remain fixed in the visions conjured up. I suddenly realize that I could be, and I in fact had been, an actor among the figures on the stage of which I was called to be a spectator. We had words that concealed our lies, faults, deceptions, and delusions. We had words whose origins we ignored and tried to avoid . . . words foreign to us, mute strangers to our own words . . . words were our solitudes . . . then . . . then there were those scenes . . . similar to that Sunday morning.

Following the wedding, the guests had proceeded to the house of Monsieur Jacques at Şişli and a banquet was held attended by two experienced hovering waiters who served the dishes fastidiously prepared by Niko and Tanaş from Facio, one of the most renowned fish restaurants in Istanbul, overlooking the Bosporus. Mr. Panayotides, the owner, had done his best to make everything impeccable. Not only was Monsieur Jacques a
habitué
of the place, but also a friend in need. There was a confidential matter between them that accounts for this homage being paid. A secret we could not find out, a secret he knew we could never have access to. This was one of the traits that made Monsieur Jacques who he was. The same was true of his relationships with Monsieur Yorgo, Muhittin Bey, and Niko. Secrets were his secrets; they should be kept secret. It was sufficient for us to know that Panayotidis was grateful to him for some reason or other. Little secrets had to remain as such. I am inclined to believe now that a distance was also felt by other relatives who were custodians of this secret. This belief makes the relationships in question more meaningful and deserving to be reconsidered, retold, and re-shared. That secret inspired certain deficiencies in us that gradually returned; deficiencies were part of our history.

Juliet’s mother, who was aware that her feuding brothers would be among the guests, was flustered at first during the days that preceded, and especially so during the exit from the synagogue. However, Madame Roza had been prescient and taken this delicate situation into consideration and arranged the seats accordingly. The situation was accepted with good grace and the problem was solved. Trying to forget was another sort of protraction, of self-evasion; for, had the situation been otherwise, problems with oneself and with others would create insurmountable difficulties. Those that had been witness to the incidents of that morning must have experienced like situations in other stories involving both themselves and others. She had invited the guests to the table with such words as “Today is the day on which the members of our families will have to take up with each other; having this point in mind, I have arranged the seating arrangement accordingly; the seats will thus be occupied alternately, a given member of one family sitting next to a member of the other family.” The success she achieved in arraying the guests had earned her the admiration of the invitees as a perfect hostess. The atmosphere had cooled down. Everybody who had been eyeing everybody else with suspicion had suddenly assumed a lenient countenance. This was the general picture, at least. A single vision had covered up the worries of that morning that others had established.

Madame Roza’s invitations had been in Spanish; she could have done it in French as well. But the fact that she had preferred to address people in Spanish rather than French, which the present audience had but a broken knowledge of, was because she thought that speaking in the vernacular would make her less presumptuous and self-effacing. This behavior would enhance her respectability. Spanish, she thought, would be the right medium that would warm the atmosphere. Moreover, she could not tell for sure whether all the guests spoke French. Cordiality and fellow feeling had to be promoted, especially between certain individuals. All these things, generated by other experiences and other cordial ties, had happened in the wink of an eye and had not been premeditated. That moment was like a silent uncertain touch to a chance spot.

But for that touch she might have had reason to keep certain reminiscences she believed to have left locked up safe and sound. Madame Roza’s particular attention to this fact did not surprise me. I knew that she possessed a wealth of experience which few people could match. This characteristic of hers would one day give birth to a few particularities she would never be able to forget. Partly because of these lost traces, I had tried to discover the true hidden or disguised character of the story. Madame Roza was a woman of certain particulars which might be generally ignored. She was marked by a meticulous, sensitive, and demanding nature, intent upon niceties which one could ignore, but which, in the long run, might covertly alter the course of our lives, without making a show of her diligence. The invitation to the table that day addressed to the families should also be considered from this point of view. The words spoken had been translated into French for those whose origins had not been in Spain, namely for the Ashkenazim who lived in the Rhineland valley and in neighboring France before their migration eastward to Slavic lands. Old hatreds, resentments, and envious rivalries were henceforth consigned to oblivion, quarreling factions were reconciled . . . As time went by everybody learned to accept each other without question or objection, notwithstanding some bickering and altercations between certain people.

Another characteristic of this banquet was the encounter of Juliet’s four paternal uncles and two maternal aunts at the same table. Such an encounter had never taken place, before or since. It is to be noted, however, that there had been family members who had not shown up for various reasons. Ginette was one; she was in Israel leading a totally different life. There was another woman whose absence had been deeply felt, at least by a particular person: it was Olga. Olga’s fate had obliged her to experience her loneliness and abandonment once more that morning. In particular, Monsieur Jacques must not have been able to rid himself of that feeling that was prompted by the steps he had failed to take that day. That failure had made itself felt despite all efforts. There was another person suffering from the same fate. Madame Roza was not a mere spectator at the place she had chosen or was obliged to be. This fact was known to everybody acquainted with the true story, everybody who had been able to understand it. Everybody had done their duty up to a certain point, everybody . . . Perhaps that was the reason why Monsieur Jacques had tried so often to dodge those various people within him. It so happened that those voices called him to secret mysterious lives at the least expected moment.

Assorted people, esoteric lives; voices which make you believe that you can wake up as a person with different values, opinions, backgrounds, and odors in defiance of all your fantasies, transformed into songs, imbued with the garb of slavery. Words . . . letters . . . words . . . letters . . . sentences left incomplete, sentences mixed together, sentences that always lead up to the same solitude, sentences that compel you to regress to a former state and build up your defenses. Was your decision in taking those people, your people, as your own, and conveying them to others in your own words, your own words exclusively, related in any way to your evasion? Had it not been you yourself, the person within you, who had been eager to tell of it? To tell it, to hold on to somewhere, to belong somewhere . . . who was that person to whom you were so desirous to communicate it but had failed? Who was that person to whom you failed to communicate it, the person whom you tried to protect by putting off your story? Such questions and the impressions that they bring with them seem to me to be more necessary than in a great many stories narrated to me by others relating to that morning. That morning there was another person whose absence was deeply felt. It was Jerry, whose absence caused his family to yearn for him even more poignantly, the youngest brother who was to opt for a quite different isolation and who was to be transformed into a hero of fiction, a figure in those photographs I secretly kept before me, a fiction whose identity came more and more to the fore. Calls were made to Jerry that evening by the people close to him which had differing vibes and questions. Everybody had become proportionally situated with his or her closeness to him. Desire was something different. There were times when desire meant injustice, there were other times when it meant regret, and other times unbearable despair. To be content with what one was allowed to say about the story that would likely be accepted by the audience was much easier; to wit what Madame Roza had revealed, or had preferred to reveal and what the listeners were disposed to accept. The main character of that fiction had been settled in his proper place that morning by the people present there. This was a place where truth and lies could not properly be defined. He was preparing for the difficult graduation exams at Harvard where he had been studying economics. He was a brilliant student; a promising future awaited him. However, just as is the case with all similar prospects, a price had to be paid for real success in life. They had to understand this; as a family they did have experience in this respect. They had learned how to look ahead with hope and fortitude. To be able to appreciate the dawning of the day one had to experience the preceding darkness of the night. Jerry had indeed desired to attend his elder brother’s wedding ceremony, but he thought his traveling such a long distance for such a brief sojourn might impair his studies. This had saddened the family who nevertheless understood his excuse. It would have been a blessing to see him there. Leaving all these things aside, there was no doubt that time was changing. One should understand the ways of young people . . . whether we liked it or not their lifestyle would necessarily be different from ours. Madame Roza had acted with subtleness and wisely intervened. Furthermore, the good old boy of Harvard had quite unexpectedly become the hero of the table. One of the Polish bridesmaids had shared her impressions in French, rolling the
r
’s in her own fashion. One of the maternal uncles had looked at her with a condescending smile. According to him, she stuck out like a sore thumb despite the gestures of goodwill being expressed by all. One could not deny that certain feelings were being betrayed by certain looks despite all efforts to conceal them. It might well be that that man had returned to his old ways. The marriage that his brother had contracted with such a woman, with a stranger, had given rise to a lasting habitual error. Nevertheless, one could not possibly deny that the Polish bride was beautiful and attractive. Yes, a beautiful and attractive woman she certainly was! It had been this natural virtue of hers that had caused all the trouble. His eyes had been fixed on her protruding breasts that her low cut dress made still more prominent. Under the circumstances, where exactly did the problem lie? Where did those feelings come from, those drives that never before found means of expression? Juliet was to tell me an anecdote one day about her uncle. We had read the story of a man who had been forced into marriage at a least expected moment with someone he had never anticipated. Despite the short lapse of time, the man, fretting the long years of marital life ahead, had to admit that he could not get accustomed to this marriage of convenience. To what extent and purpose would being a mere spectator to other people’s loves make any difference? The story seemed to induce the listener to seek answers to this question. “So what had been Uncle Victor’s fate,” said Juliet after a long silence. “He never loved the woman he was forced to marry; nobody ever had an inkling of his gentle soul. He used to recite a good many poems by Victor Hugo. He spent his last years in utter loneliness. He had experienced an aching black void upon the death of his wife. This experience was due, in my mind, to an incident that he recollected of his younger days. He distinctly remembered it. There was a young Austrian girl who had taught him games in a language he could not understand at the house where they spent the summer. At the eleventh hour, the memory of those times was reawakened vividly. The girl had suddenly left for Madrid. Her father was employed at the consulate. After that fatal day they never saw each other again. Nonetheless, for several years thereafter Uncle Victor had continued to repair to that residence on Heybeliada every summer . . . ” Could it be that the man whose eyes had remained riveted on the bride was that same uncle? It is up to us to establish the connection between the two incidents. We should be mindful of the fact that stories lie hidden in different places for different people until their time to be told is due, they revive hope in us, even a faint one, in addition to a wry joy. Hope gains meaning through stories, even though they might lack originality; stories believed to be different all the same. This conviction, the appearance of this belief, is strong enough to foster in me a line of thought which presumes that during that day spent at that table there had been more than one story being held with bated breath. Another maternal uncle, who stood out among the guests as being dressed up to the nines, the one who enjoyed the repute of being a banker, had remarked—as though he intended to share a secret with the husband of Madame Roza’s cousin who had made a name for himself as a stamp collector whose collection had earned the admiration of connoisseurs and who was always busy in his shop where he sold electrical goods—that he had greatly appreciated Monsieur Jacques for the lavish generosity he displayed for his sons’ education. Behind this laudatory remark lay, I dare say, the anticipation of a disclosure about the actual amount of money spent to this end. However, this was not the right person to ask such a question. Yet, it must be deemed worthy of our attention that despite all our flaws we cannot break ourselves of our age-old habit of poking our nose into other people’s private business. This may partly be due to our efforts to get rid of the hell we cannot expose to others ourselves. If it were otherwise, how could we ever put up with the burden of having skeletons in our closet and endure the sense of loneliness that this brought about? Madame Roza’s words about Jerry had affected Monsieur Jacques and Berti, in particular. Different impressions had generated different meanings, different yearnings and different regrets. A wry smile had appeared on their faces; a smile whose true meaning indicated a concealed sorrow and confusion. Juliet, who had recounted to me the wedding ceremony in the synagogue, Berti’s awkwardness during the ceremony, his clumsiness, the details of the dinner party as though she tried to represent them on a stage, knew all too well what those smiles concealed. These were the very first moments when she felt she was in touch with that family, with her new family. They had met halfway on the road to an agony difficult to disclose and divulge. They had become confidants; they shared a secret that would be kept undisclosed for years. This compelled all parties to remain bound to each other. Nobody could unfold the secrets of his soul to another human being. Was this disassociation a fragmentation in other people in whom one found a shared fate, a continuous recomposition of the same song?