Istanbul Was a Fairy Tale (58 page)

Berti and Juliet had brought me that heroine at the least expected moment. At the time, we were not conscious of this. My only concern at the time, when I was reviewing our secrets and could not avoid asking myself once more who had stayed in whom and how, was my reluctance to betray them. As a matter of fact, I may not have known or I may not have wanted to know, at the time, what I had actually been protecting or what I had been trying to protect. It is only now that I can understand the fact that my reticence and my keeping of my feelings from Nora, my sincere feelings, was actually an act of betrayal. What has been aroused by certain things kept secret and left undisclosed are carried with the greatest difficulty. Yet, I think a considerable time must elapse before I can tell of these and settle my accounts with the consequences of this betrayal. In fact, every one of us betrayed certain things which we could but define long after we had suffered losses. Betrayal was an integral part of our secret history which we could never rid ourselves of; it was the history of our own selves embedded in others; betrayal was our solitude . . . Through the obscurity of those stories we had all betrayed Nora. The person we had betrayed was a real person who groped her way in the darkness, a person who, like anybody else, was in search of her voice. What had differed between us had been that gap that separated her from us, from the bare fact. We had all seen her as a heroine; we had succeeded in seeing her as such. To put it another way, we had become her spectator; we had succeeded in becoming her spectator. Our spectatorship was the judgment that had been passed by those judges that we had wanted to kill in other lives. Some of us had called this our conflict with the individuals within ourselves, those individuals we wanted to forget, while others had called this our fate. There were other places and contingencies, different sentiments under different names, which had dragged us to different fields, and would continue dragging us perhaps. However, after a certain point, despite all these various fields, at places which we thought new or at old places we refreshed, we would gradually waste away despite appearances we had recently been conscious of. Had this been so just because we did not know and could not learn how to fight, to really fight, our feelings, justified resentments, and indignation? The answer to this question lay deep within us. We had to look for it within us, in those fears we could not get rid of. To this question we could provide different answers, in different periods of our life, to different individuals. Nonetheless, these answers were more often than not provided by those individuals resigned to their fate. Nora, the Nora of this story, would be among those who had no other choice but to depart. Nora, then, would have the courage to take that step and succeed in turning into a heroine of another story. She would be able to live up to the meaning behind her name; she would have the courage to face that challenge during the days I’d known her. For us, she would be an embodied regret; a bitter experience embalmed, impossible to annihilate. A twinge of remorse . . . Nora . . . remorse. Because she had had the guts to live her own story with utter disregard for the pain of other individuals whom she would have ripped from her tale. She had to secure her freedom as a heroine. The boundaries of this narrative that had its origins somewhere in Istanbul years ago had to be crossed. I was sure of that; everybody knew this, everybody who had an insight into the tale and believed that other words had been lived and preserved beyond this boundary. The truth, the essential truth lay perhaps in the fact that a person not only had to know how to understand and to try to understand this, but also how to embrace both sides of the said boundary. But the boundary encompassed not only hopes but also devastations experienced by everybody differently, with different dreads and disappointments. Beyond the boundary meant, according to certain maps, no return, and according to others it meant the acknowledgment of that girl’s expulsion. For, certain sympathies showed themselves with flying colors, or at least seemed to. What was known was the fact that her adventures could not have been encompassed by those moments and those relationships; adventures of old which had sought their differing means of expression in different compartments and realms. Each one of us would narrate her adventures by our own account of them, or at least would show the desire to share it with somebody. A stare, a mere stare was able to make us ruminate over the old days. A limited number of moments I now and then conjure up from Nora’s past seem to invite me somewhere else. I had been given the hint of a departure on that Saturday which today seems to have been lost in the mist of the past . . . It was an afternoon when Juliet and Berti were away from home . . . It looked as if it was going to rain. Nora was exercising on the piano; she was working on a piece I frequently encountered in a good many stories; she was to take part in a contest of young successful virtuosos. I had silently sneaked into the room. She had sensed my presence but had made as though I was not there, or as if she desired not to interrupt her performance. Who was seated on that stool before the piano? What was that thing that had driven me to sketch out this section of the speech, of our speech, and convey it to others? Under the circumstances, I might have preferred not to provide any answer to this question and prepare the path for the consequences caused by the absence of any response. Yet, I knew where I happened to be, or where I had returned. As I crossed the threshold of that room, I was perfectly aware that I was going back to that story and wished to re-enter it. Considering what I had experienced before, I must say I had never been so near to that piano. So near each other we were . . . even though our stares were directed in different directions . . . near each other . . . because we had been led into the same melody regardless of our differing places in time. This meant we were to write a poem on the same theme and live it. I thought I had a renewed faith in a deception. This deception was my contrivance; it was a part of that photograph that held me tight on the days I had lived by representing its differing shadows according to the place in time. In other words, they were what came within my sphere of vision. To have taken a woman, a woman I could have potentially loved, as a heroine had been my error. It seemed as though one of those colors, one of the colors we had lost, was concealed in it. Those days without words and sentences that were the consequence of this error opened with mornings deserving to be re-lived. You might, for instance, while waiting for the ferryboat which would take you from the island to the din of the city, ask yourself about the time of that illusory experience you had associated with the taste of a fish-scented savory roll covered with sesame seeds; or, you might take delight in having yourself served tea in a glass not properly washed; you might suddenly feel like smoking a hand-rolled cigarette; you might get a cheap thrill in concocting a story about the passage of a carriage at a phenomenal time. But this was my illusion; I was in the grip of it; I found myself always in a state of preparation, always busy with preparations. Nora was unaware of this. Nor did she know anything of her having been cast in such a story as a heroine. However, I was seated next to her. She continued to play. It was as though I had been watching her hands and fingers for the first time. I had the presentiment of a transformation; the room was being transmuted into music, reminiscent of tunes that echoed in those stories, of tunes lost in the distance. I seemed to recall the voice from which the said melody was originating. We were in the midst of a concerto which could not bring two people in unison at a critical point in a story. It was Mozart. Mozart, who had failed to end
ear himself to me, who was assuming a new identity with this improvised little poem. I’d been laboring under a misapprehension once more; I had become aware that I had placed an individual in the wrong place because of other people who had been left there to vegetate. It was Mozart’s vengeance. Mozart was wreaking vengeance on me. This reaction at the moment of encounter (which I was hardly expecting) was undoubtedly a retaliation for my pitiful deafness. This was like touching that melody by passing through that history, through the secret history I was hearing. Mozart’s well-known laughter which created different impressions in different individuals echoed across the room . . . She had suddenly stopped playing and grasped my hand. Her eyes were fixed on the keys. “It’s as if something is being ripped from within me,” she said in an almost imperceptible whisper. We were silent. I was staring at the keys of the piano. After a moment’s silence, she added: “There’ll be no recital . . . I won’t play for them, never . . . ” Her voice betrayed resentment as well as fright. I had squeezed her hand: it had the warm presence of a young girl on the threshold of womanhood. I felt something oozing into me from that fright; something that could not be blocked, intangible, ineffable . . . Our lips were united. I felt a void, a void that dragged us to that union. That void was me, myself, at that very moment; or it was her; or perhaps both of us at that fleeting moment. It may be that that void was perhaps the most difficult step that would take us to that path for which we had been preparing unawares. That void might well be tantamount to our encrypted name or names. Yet, at this very moment I cannot properly recollect that void. All that I can remember is the scent of the chewing gum in her mouth, communicated to me by her tongue which twirled around my mouth. Our desire was roused through the displacement of erotic and libidinal interest and was accompanied by irregular heartbeats. I wanted to put faith once more in a desire that lust could not consume. My lips had grazed the contours of her lips and wandered about her cheeks and neck. Then we were locked in a tender embrace. “I don’t think I really wanted it,” she said afterward. This had severed us from each other. We had lapsed into a silence, shunning each other’s eyes. I wonder if we had been in pursuit of our childhood at that moment. The tune that lingered on the keys of the piano was a tune I could no longer describe or define. We were still avoiding each other’s eyes. In that split second, I had vaguely recollected those moments lived only once and abandoned somewhere to remain uppermost in my thoughts. I wonder if those moments were a part of these moments. “We are turning inward and undergoing a steady process of dissolution,” I said. “Many people will think I’m on the wrong path . . . but I’ll keep a stiff upper lip and feel myself refreshed with a new vigor,” she remarked. I had observed that everybody went their own way; that that way had inexorably been traced by the people themselves and that it behooved the narrator of a given life to separate the wheat from the chaff, picking out what had, or had not, been risked for the sake of the journey. Certain visions had surged in my imagination: I’d witnessed random visions from other people’s lives . . . These visions were populated with figures whose lives were in one way or another interwoven with Nora’s. The figures in question had appeared to her from different angles with different voices. I felt compelled to avow that I had been heading for a long story. It looked as though certain steps were being taken to prove that they were capable of being taken and that they still would in future. Yet, those steps might not always be our own. However, to be able to proceed, or to entertain the hope of being capable of it were tantamount to having faith in one’s ongoing existence. We were the slaves of a handful of expressions or sentences we appropriated after having nourished them with our imagination. The cold fact was that everybody became extinct to somebody else when a certain day came. Everybody died somewhere, sometimes along one’s own path. But the number of people who could find his own characters was not great. I was heading for that long story in the hope of finding the things I expected to find beyond the border. On my way to that destination, many a stranger would be keeping me company. She had understood . . . “I shan’t be what you’re expecting me to be,” she rejoined. I had tried to insert this insurrectional behavior somewhere in the story. The time that elapsed in the meantime proved her unshakable faith in the path she had chosen. She had never been as I had wished her to be; she gave nothing of herself to those who wanted her for their own causes. That is how she behaved. The meaning of the path she took should be sought here, through this withholding, in this effort of keeping away from everything. The path was in fact being drawn gradually through resolution . . . in the hope of coming across to another individual . . . without being aware of the fact that in the coming pages of that long story she would secure a place not easily forgotten, reminiscent of a relative of hers who was as proud and as resolute as she had been, although she had rose to the challenge of being treated as a castaway. Nora had stepped out of the story one day, leaving it unfinished at a moment least expected by those who were not prepared for such a contingency and who expected her to be heading for a life proscribed by the community. Can this be the reason why I’ve made the necessary arrangements to enable her to live elsewhere as if I could not do otherwise? Perhaps. Actually, she had been of those who had been the author of certain contingencies within me. Through her choice, for the sake of life, she had caused a deep-seated feeling of resurgence in Berti and Juliet. It looked as though certain things had streamed out of their control . . . certain things that they were reluctant to disclose, and which they preferred to be kept secret in their private worlds through different guises. Nora was that thing they could never be, the person they had both left behind. They should be proud of her. However, the grievance engendered by their despair and that sense of deficiency had had the upper hand and they found themselves overwhelmed, suppressing all the pleasure they would be fain to enjoy. A day would come when we would pluck up the courage to discuss this feeling and try to disclose to each other what was in our souls. To this end we had to attend other funerals vested in different garbs . . . As for what remained of those we had tried to kill in full knowledge of the fact, daring to undertake an act of complicity by the exchange of furtive glances, silences . . . she had had a story within me which she had failed to dictate to me as I would have wished her to. I don’t know if I could have set out on such a journey at the time and plucked up the courage required for a prospective alteration of the story. There is no sense in providing an answer to this question, in trying to make as though I had done so and to expect a transformation once more. Haven’t we finally reached our final destination, the place that we deserve? Our journey’s end, unalterable henceforth; the place removed from people contrary to our expectations, the place harboring refuge. At present, I can better appreciate the inveteracy of this sentiment. She was the heroine of another story . . . the heroine of a story with different boundaries, protected by people that I kept alive through my dilemmas and apprehensions. This may have been the reason for our failure to see each other in those days. This may have been the reason for my fear of being swept up by the storm, ripping me from my grip and tossing me toward infinity. This may have been the reason why I had been trying to cling to my solitude. These were the inevitable consequences of indignation, of an indignation that could not be expressed to one’s hea