Istanbul Was a Fairy Tale (92 page)

Everybody has a story which he takes to be lost, which he tries to collect bits and pieces of for the sake of the preservation of his life. To have lived several years in the company of individuals that seemed alien, to have studied in schools one has disdained and to have toiled day and night in disagreeable jobs, to have been fancying that one feels exiled where one lives, imagining the ideal jobs awaiting one somewhere else day and night . . . all these things . . . do they imply efforts to return sooner or later to one’s own small world? I do not know. Either I don’t know, or I prefer not to know, and confine myself within the boundaries of a single answer. Yet, I should like to think that the very act of asking this question brings me to that human being I have been looking for all these years and never given up the hope of finding him. To return, to return after a series of departures means to desire to enter a new room unvisited until that point. One wonders what sort of a room one penetrates after so many years. Who will be facing you in that room as your step into it? Beyond the boundary, you are alone, whether you like it or not. At such moments, beyond the boundary you hear your own voice . . . It is time you touched it with your hand . . . you have to touch that face. Other people’s geography has brought you gradually to those regrets and deep scars, the story of which you can tell only to yourself. When I consider all those questions and returns I find myself asking where exactly I happen to be in the midst of those little victories and those defeats I always tried to hide and cover up, in the midst of the fantasies bordering my imagination and of my realities, of ‘that family’ that I’m trying to reconstruct with what I could gather from other families. At such times, I feel dejected; it is meaninglessness, an abandonment which I could share with no one. I find myself once more at a crossroads. I’m faced with a dilemma: either to beat it, consigning to the body of an ordinary human being all the variations, associations and absurdities within me, or to continue on the road of that old story in search of new words. I have always wanted to describe this hesitancy; perhaps I will be carrying this hesitancy around with me till the end of my days . . . even though I am aware that certain emotions will never be able to find the places reserved for them and even though I cannot ignore this fact. I must say I’ve been obsessed by the idea of describing those human beings for many years. My dreams might have had the objective of describing those brief moments of love making, of reviving those true moments, of finding that brief span of happiness. For that brief span of happiness likely to associate in one those brief moments of joy. That story whose end was far from being predictable had a magic spell; it was as important to live the story as it was to tell it. This long story must have had a share of my desire to be seen as a volunteer exile on an island where I would narrate my recollections to a native, from my own island, inspired by the author of a work I can never forget, during those days when I used to shuttle with clumsy steps between unrealized dreams. I had many reasons for reproducing my delusions and illusions. This small dream inspired me with the idea of arranging a meeting in which the individuals whose writings I wanted to share would come together on my island for that very purpose. For that island reminded one not only of exile and thralldom, but also of the exigency of collective life. That island had been the selected venue where people would come together, a locale where a wish to remain separated, to be protected, to share a privacy might be realized to the extent the prevailing circumstances allowed. They might be inclined to act out once more the personas they would never symbolize. It was necessary to postpone the retaliations to an unknown date, and to forget the relations that secretly stole from certain people the possibility of contributing to the incidents that had occurred. However, as I made headway in the story I realized that this dream, this meeting, would never become reality. Everybody was lost in their own respective solitudes. Everybody was in his own exile. Everybody had a smile that he or she would not be able to express and would have preferred to keep to themselves. Platitudes meant that everything was alright, like in all climates. Walls had to be raised. Walls would always be raised; otherwise, I couldn’t explain our being dragged to new islands of solitude when we wanted to live, truly live, for a very brief period of time with our fellow beings. The deafness we had to experience in the places we thought we had to visit. We had to ask once again where, in whom, and when we had lost the keys to that adventure . . . We had been called there sometimes by a look or by a word . . . only a look or a word. In order to understand and decide, which is more important, which defeats we had suffered in consequence of which dreams, we had to live our true losses . . .

( . . . ) Did that time include my experiences during which I had been newly acquainted with the walls of my primary school or those moments when I had to show up in my green pinafore rather unwillingly at the flag ceremony on Saturdays? Is it hovering over my memory at present? The brilliant students were rewarded with the privilege of carrying the flagstaff. I personally had that privilege once. But I could tell no one my distress for having to carry that heavy burden with my puny body in the presence of that crowd, it seemed appalling to me then; the so-called reward had been a punishment. In holding the flagstaff I was helped by mistress Türkân, whose smiling face and full breasts are still in my memory and whom my mother had sympathized with on account of her short-lived, unhappy marriage. Those were the mornings when smiles drew me toward a warmth whose real source I could never find. My failing to compensate for the coldness of the school despite my affection for mistress Türkân might perhaps be explained by my remoteness from that source. I was making headway toward a nightmare. The sound of cutlery coming from the refectory and the loud laughter of my fellow students heralded a fear I could not define. I was on the brink of turning inward. I well remember my diffidence in failing to ask permission of mistress Türkan for answering nature’s call during the class and the consequent incontinence and the distress felt in remaining in that condition till my return home might have been due to this. Moreover I wasn’t used to the old style toilets without a bowl. The hole on which one crouched was so large that I had dreamt of children just like me falling into it; the children who could not pull themselves up despite their best efforts. Adults haunted that place, but they didn’t see or hear me. Only one had turned his gaze toward me and looked at me with a broad smile and appalling eyes. I had tried to shout but without success. He was smiling; he seemed to know that I could not shout or make myself heard. That speechlessness and that silence, were they really the darkest alleys of those nightmares?

( . . . ) Dreams or things left behind somewhere as though in a dream . . . I wonder in which of my writings I had tried to announce that odor, an odor that can never be forgotten, one which gave life to a city. I can remember, for instance, the smell of chocolate coming from the
Nestle
chocolate factory which pervaded the air of my primary school next to the
Bomonti
brewery, spreading as far as the house of my grandmother. The streets breathed a different atmosphere at those hours. I was to visit the origin of that odor one day in the company of my grandfather. The enormous cauldrons where chocolate was made are still in my memory. A man by the name of Master Yorgo, a man of very old aspect, perhaps due to his hoary hair, had tasted the confection and said something to the apprentices around him. I had wanted to taste it as well. “No, Sir,” he said, “the chocolate is not ready yet.” Before leaving the plant we had been given bars of chocolate as a gift, the same bars of chocolate available in the market. Master Yorgo knew my grandfather from the time of his military service. There was a longstanding connection between them, a connection that could not be soiled by equivocations. Everybody had had to climb his own ladder to professional perfection. For me, the magic lay in the mystery that that confection in the cauldron contained. By the way, the smell of meals in the process of being prepared had appealed to me as much as their tastes and flavors. Those smells associated in me the places to which I could not have access. This may have been the reason why certain people had occupied those houses in my imagination.

In this outlandishness there lay concealed the traces of what I had experienced during those midday meals on Fridays at school. As the mealtime approached, I began waiting impatiently for my grandmother who brought me in lidded meal containers of hot meatballs and fried potatoes, the taste of which is still lingering on my palate. On one of those Fridays there had been a heavy snowfall. We were in the refectory. The meal had been distributed. I felt uneasy. This restlessness had prevented me from laughing at the clowning of Selahattin, my bosom friend at the time, who drank his soup emitting a hissing sound disregarding the admonition of his teachers and its being splattered about, when he had grown up he had taken to climbing mountains after having failed to realize the Demirkazık climb during the winter sports months following the marriage of an alpinist he was infatuated with to another alpinist, both of whom finally opened a little shop at Mercan. My grandmother had arrived in the middle of the meal service. I can still remember her distinctly as she came down the stairs with a smile on her lips. She had made it in spite of the blizzard outside. Yet, the icy soles had made her fall and she had to descend the staircase at a more rapid pace than otherwise foreseen, on her buttocks. Uncle Dursun had rushed to her aid; he gave a helping hand to everybody and was often reproached not only by our headmistress or other teachers, but also by certain parents, for his awkward manners although he did all the handiwork in the school. He fixed the malfunctioning electrical gadgets, kindled the stoves, plumbed the sinks, stayed overnight in the school, and befriended the boys by his mimicry of animals. No harm was done. “Your packed lunch! Your packed lunch!” cried my fellow students in hoots of laughter. Selahattin had a gift of keeping cool; and being furious at his school fellows for their guffaws, he had thrown forks and spoons at them; for which he was sent to stand in the corner on a single leg for half an hour by mistress Müzeyyen, nicknamed ‘the ramrod,’ in doing so setting a record hard to break.

However, that was the last of the meals brought to school. I had asked my grandmother to stop. In those days I could still imagine the possibility of getting lost in others and behaving like other people. In the long run, I would realize how fascinating the dream I had been chasing was despite all the disappointments. When one considers those disappointments, one cannot help concluding that the school was a
locus criminis
, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

A long time thereafter, I tried to remind my grandmother of those days. She was an aged and senile woman lying in bed silently in one of the shabby old rooms of the French hospital. She had had a sudden obstruction of a blood vessel by an embolus; not only did she suffer from amnesia, but she had also lost her faculty of recognizing people. It was my only night of vigil at her bedside. She had nodded with a smile as though she understood what I had been saying. Had she really? I doubt it. It may be that she had visions of her past life that she could not share with me. Time-honored visions she couldn’t communicate, visions whose witnesses had disappeared without exception, and consequently without possible testimony from someone. I wouldn’t have the pleasure of secretly sneaking her the food the doctor had prohibited anymore due to her high blood pressure. Those days heralded the end of my boyish aiding and abetting. One day she had ceased to utter a word and remained in that state for days. I cannot exactly say when we actually parted.

( . . . ) Now and then on Saturdays at noon my grandparents came to fetch me and took me to their house where I passed the weekend. In their place, I would be carrying the yearning for a true home to other rooms during the years to come. This yearning would continue in other houses, with other people, and would be penned in the company of other visions and words; to be transformed into other people in other rooms. It was there that I had listened to the hits of the day, on singles . . . my first singles. I want to believe that I will one day go back to the songs of those days and write about them. Certain songs are unforgettable. Even though certain songs meet with others and flow together they remain one’s favorites all the same.

( . . . ) As the days, months, and years went by my visits to my parents were to become more frequent. The days spent at school would one day come to an end and the indignations that enriched different recollections and lent meaning to them in Şişli would bring about my departure on a new journey. My learning how to drink soda pop direct from the bottle was one of the first signs of growing up in the eyes of those individuals who lived a peripheral life to mine. Those were the people who asked children the multiplication table as proof of their having become adults, as well as to confirm their own expectations. For me, one of the most important manifestations of having grown up was one’s endeavor to act as though one had already become a big boy in that secretly confined space. One had to learn how to act with different people and how to abandon who at what time. This was the only way of preserving the child within you perennially. That eternal child had to be kept intact. That child should have you, yourself, as the only interlocutor. You could hear this voice in many old texts. That voice had emerged through different people disguised by different words. That voice had vanished into thin air along with those people at different periods of history and those deaths manifested through different verbal expressions. The reason for your apprehension of being unable to convey to another person your experiences as you would have liked might be due to that difference or your desire to cling to its protection. A price has to be paid for this, of course. You have to suffer losses. Separations are imminent. You have got to acquiesce to returns. A moment comes when you feel like coming to a standstill, a standstill that is premeditated. Then you begin keeping close track of yourself; this will take up all your time. You will embrace an individual you are attached to who had settled within you and whom you had not seen for quite a while, for instance in front of a movie theater, and as you are experiencing the warmth of that embrace in all its nakedness, who do you think would be that person or thing that you are embracing . . . on those Sundays when none of your worries are given voice to, when one’s feeling low, those who go to have a lunch in a restaurant, accompanied by their respective anxieties and desolations cannot confess even to themselves what importance those family deaths have? What sort of families are they in which no questions are asked properly? And if they are ever asked, none of them receives a proper and frank answer, who considers the climax of early ejaculation into questionable women of easy virtue, or who is unconsciously buggered with simple tricks? These are some of the problems found in this city in which I live, which I try to understand, and which is moving away from me apace. Amongst other issues, I must also quote the case of individuals who cannot properly live in their homes because of their outer concerns, who go on package tours in order to pack their experiences in their luggage, who give serious cause for concern about cars that consume less and less oil, who sit in tasteless dinner sets, and who believe themselves to have been informed of the goings on by the headlines of newspapers. At such times, I leave everybody where they belong. I leave everybody in his own reality in order to find myself. The flights that ripped me gradually from those people were the same old flights seen the world over. According to those books that are supposed to be guides for our lifestyle, the said flights have their special designation. We happen to be under the umbrella of knowledge accumulated and stored. Must I make headway toward a rain without paying any attention to what I may run into under these circumstances? Must I remember once more that to live one’s emotions, to venture to live them is much more difficult than to narrate their story? Certain defeats had certainly killed certain things within us. Certain defeats had most probably made it possible to proceed on toward new defeats. But was there any other way to believe in one’s past, to hear one’s footsteps or to feel oneself continuously in the midst of that squabble?