Many and Many a Year Ago (14 page)

When I came to Professor Ali's room I heard the radio murmuring softly, so I knocked, but there was no answer. I opened it with my spare key. I knew I would find him with his hardcover notebook on his lap, jotting away with his pencil. The cynical expression on his face as he listened to my Belgrano report didn't surprise me—because it was a lie that Esther Arditti's original Buenos Aires address had been sent to Ali Uzel by a mysterious stranger. Why would my cunning and sneaky neighbor want to hide the fact that he'd had the address of his beloved in his possession all along? It struck me then that, yes, the good professor
was
quite capable of spraining his ankle on purpose to keep himself out of the investigation. But if that was true, could I solve the Ali Uzel mystery by reaching one of the Ardittis?

I paced up and down my room. I listened to Italian songs on the radio. I looked at the ads in the
Buenos Aires Herald
, as if there might be clues in the advertisements. I laughed at my futile efforts to find “Arditti” in the phone book. As consolation I surveyed the letter “T” in the mosaic-like list of names. I counted fifty-eight “Turco”s: Turchi … Turci … Turck … as I came to Turcoff, I dropped off to sleep.

A warm winter morning, earth and sky all dressed in the same tone of gray …

“Target: Recoleta,” said Ariel, abruptly pulling me back from my reverie. Then I remembered: the reason Recoleta was the only name from the guidebook that stuck in my mind was the presence there of Cemeterio de la Recoleta and its funerary monuments.

Ariel was euphoric, smiling like someone enjoying the pleasure of taking a kitten he'd found on the street home to its owner. He'd showed up in his most flamboyant clothes on the assumption that he would be ushered into the presence of Izak Roditi. He looked like a cartoon character, but I was too exhausted to laugh.

Of course I knew he would tell his mother that we were in Buenos Aires, and why, but I didn't expect her to be inspired to conduct a preliminary investigation of her own. According to what Señora Gluckman had unearthed since dawn, Esther had never succeeded in getting along with her middle-class compatriots. Señora G's sources couldn't agree on the number of Ardittis who'd lost their lives in the notorious traffic accident, and they had no idea what had become of the beauty queen, Stella, whose picture they occasionally saw in magazines. By the time the Citroen turned into the elite Avenida Alvear, I'd decided that if I failed to see Roditi I would make a final search for Esther in the Jewish cemeteries and then head back to Istanbul. Walking past those rows of highrise apartment buildings, I felt like I was strolling through the Alsancak district of Ä°zmir. We approached the outer gate to number 1866C and at once encountered a large man in uniform who stood like an Inca warrior and produced his careful sentences in a deep clear voice. He softened as words like “Turco” and “Estambul” poured out of Ariel's mouth. After a few words on the phone he escorted us to the main entrance. It was as ostentatious as the building was unimposing. Once inside, we were led to an area walled off by glass and guarded by another uniformed giant. After quietly making his own phone call, he allowed us to sit on the couch facing him like detainees before a judge. Under the terms of a response that arrived ten minutes later I was to record my first name, surname, and precise Istanbul address. Nervously I wrote “Balat” on the letterhead stationery. The guard seemed as tense as an anti-aircraft gunner as he committed my three-word message to a fax machine. The machine was still whirring when a small thin woman with glasses materialized. The burly guard jumped to his feet like a soldier, but kept his eyes to the ground.

“My name is Astrid Radzymin,” said the woman in stilted English. “Welcome to Buenos Aires, Mr. Kuray. Izak Roditi is expecting you.” As she led the way to a private elevator, Ariel said to my back, “I'll wait for you across the street at the Alvear Palace Hotel.”

The old elevator was rising toward the eighth floor when it suddenly fell under the sway of a high-pitched male voice. I seemed to be listening to a sad Spanish
ghazal
. Noting my startled look, Astrid smirked a little; I felt as though I was being dragged into a
film noir
.

“You have half an hour,” she warned as she took me through a black door.

The far wall of the spacious salon was taken up from top to bottom by an aquarium in which two black fish about a foot long swam proudly. A man in a gray suit sitting at the black glass table in front of the aquarium like some kind of swashbuckling captain said, in Turkish, “Come on over, my countryman.” The very fit Izak Roditi, silver-gray hair combed straight back, looked like the actor Stewart Granger. Not only did he shake my hand warmly, but he caressed my cheeks and his eyes filled with tears.

“I can hardly believe that after fifty years in Argentina I finally have a Turkish guest from Balat,” he said, on the verge of breaking down.

The phone rang. As he scolded the caller I surveyed his headquarters, object by object, from my armchair. Hanging on the walls were a world map on which colored pins marked a few remote islands, and a number of family pictures in heavy frames. Though I could think of no Latin actresses as charming as the wife whom Izak Roditi embraced in each picture, I didn't much care for the buck-toothed daughter or the snobbish-looking son. In glass cases arranged symmetrically around the room were fossilized sea shells and beads that looked like black pearls.

Two cups of Turkish coffee sat on the porcelain tray that Astrid brought in just as Roditi hung up. Eyes glittering, he said, “If I didn't get a cup of Turkish coffee every two hours I'd go crazy.” He went on. “I'm pleased to say that the only thing I inherited from my father was this addiction. He asked, “What do you want from this poor Roditi, my countryman?”

I recalled those dim Balat coffeehouses. As I related the story of Esther and Ali, I decided that his drooping countenance was not the result of my accomplished narrative abilities.

“Forget Astrid's half-hour time limit.” Downing the thick coffee, he launched into a speech in mixed Turkish and English.

“I was born at the Or-Ahayim Hospital in Balat on the day the Turkish republic was declared. I was never sure whether to be happy or sad when the neighborhood called me ‘Cumhur' for ‘Republic.' My father Henri Roditi taught history and religion at the Jewish schools. He was an ambitious man. After school he kept accounts for Jewish businessmen, swearing under his breath. He seemed angry at the fact that his careless father had lost a fortune in Europe. My mother Alma worked part-time at the Jewish orphanage in Galata; she was a soft-hearted woman with the soul of an artist. We led a modest life on the ground floor of a two-storey house behind the Yanbol Synagogue.

“We moved to Ä°zmir when I was seven. A relative of my father had found him a job with an exporter of dried fruits. Within two years my father became foreman, then manager, then chief financial advisor of the company. But despite his new status and our new flat on the top floor of a modern building in Alsancak, he wasn't satisfied. The year I became a third-grader the whole family began taking Italian lessons from a coquettish old Levantine lady who had never been to Italy in her life. I didn't know why. I started to cry when they told me we were moving to Milan. It had been tough enough adapting to Ä°zmir. According to my father, however, the young Turkish republic, except for a handful of established merchants, held no promise for brilliant young Jews.

“Our downstairs neighbor Sophia had a cousin who was a jeweler in Milan, and Baruch Shapiro was looking for an honest assistant. I remember my father shouting, ‘Alma! I think I believe in God now!' after he'd been promised a partnership with Shapiro. It didn't take the widower Shapiro long to feel close to our family, which had always lived by Ottoman values. He secured for us the furnished apartment below his own, taking it over from his cousin who had lived there with his Gentile wife when they were working together and whom Shapiro had evicted when the cousin tried to swindle him. A quiet and mysterious man in his sixties, Shapiro wanted me to call him Grandpa. Not only did he send me to a school for rich Jewish kids, but he hired a private teacher to help with my Italian. He respected the memory of his wife who had died in childbirth. I heard once that he tolerated no objects in his plainly furnished flat that would overshadow the pictures of his Rita in their silver frames.

“The treasure of Ali Baba and the forty thieves was always what I thought of when I went to Il Rubino, Grandpa's shop on Via Montenapoleone. I hid my obsession with the beauty of the precious stones I found there even from my mother for fear that somebody might think me unbalanced. I could hardly wait for summer vacations and the pleasure of working as an apprentice at Il Rubino. It was always interesting to observe our customers, some of whom came all the way from Switzerland for our rubies. By the end of our second year I was starting to feel at home in Milan. But in the winter of 1936 I wasn't surprised to learn that we were moving to Paris with my honorary grandpa: the prime minister, Benito Mussolini, had entered Adolf Hitler's orbit and the country's Jews were becoming increasingly agitated. When encounters in town turned physical, valuable properties and expensive moveable items sold fast and cheap. In Paris we moved into a duplex apartment at Quai de Jemappes, where I learned that the most exquisite diamonds and rubies had been sent ahead and put in the safe of a private bank.

“It then emerged that Shapiro, who was again residing on the floor above us, was the senior partner in a store called Le Rubis on Rue de la Paix; I was as angry as if I'd caught him cheating at cards. Sometimes when I became distracted during my French lessons with Madame Nemirovsky of Odessa, I would calculate how many months we could last in Paris. As worry-free Parisians were celebrating Christmas of 1938, Shapiro made a guess: ‘By next Christmas Hitler will invade Paris, and London by the one after that.' I was aware of the bottleneck that the jewelry business was becoming. What we needed immediately was somewhere where Hitler could not follow us. New York? My father wept when the U.S. embassy, despite pressure, refused us a visa because Baruch, a staunch anti-communist, was born in Belgrade. I was amazed to hear that our Plan B was Havana, that notorious center of intemperance. A diplomat whose mistress was our customer had little difficulty in persuading us that we could escape from there to New York when the war was over. My father took a ship to Havana in the fall of 1939 and I'm sure he had the rarest gems with him. By the new year he had opened bank accounts and made the other necessary arrangements to gradually transfer Shapiro's holdings to Havana from his Paris and London banks. The remaining inventory at Le Rubis was disposed of by February 1940. In April we boarded an old steamer at Le Havre and sailed for Havana by way of Martinique. In June the Nazi army invaded Paris …

“At first sight Havana looks like an eternal holiday resort. I was apprehensive on hearing that we would have a maid and driver at our villa in Vedado. Turkish was our family's favorite language, though we would resort to Ladino–Sephardic Spanish–for really important matters. I had to take lessons in modern Spanish for six months to go to high school. When I took a shine to my so-called poet-teacher's mulatto daughter Ramona, I was surprised to see that my parents agreed on something for the first time—opposing me. If I was the least visible student at the exclusive Belen College, the most charismatic one was Fidel Castro. It amused both of us that people had trouble understanding our affinity. It so happened that Fidel's maternal grandfather was an Istanbul Jew who had changed his religion and last name (from Ruso to Ruz) when he married. The official name of Mr. Cuba, who was, by the way, devoted to his ailing mother, was Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz. Castro Ruz graduated from high school a year behind me, but he and I met up once more at Havana University's law school. I watched him in action during student elections and other incidents and said, ‘If they don't assasinate him before he turns thirty, he'll take over everything.' The year we'd landed in Havana the retired officer Fulgencia Batista had become president after a shady election, causing unrest in the country. My family decided not to open a shop in that atmosphere, and so we wandered around like Anatolian village women with bags in our hands, trying to sell jewelry to tourists' wives and rich businessmen.

“After a heart attack in 1942, Grandpa Baruch turned to religion. When synagogue services were over he would drop in at cafés frequented by European Jews and lose himself in nostalgic conversation. (There were 20,000 Jews in the city at the time.) Although we had no real financial problems, my father continued to import semi-precious stones as if to prove to his benefactor that he was not an idler. The day Hitler committed suicide, Baruch Shapiro died in his sleep. Just before they took him down to the hospital morgue I sneaked into his room out of curiosity. What I saw was an expression of great peace and accomplishment on his face. I still can't believe that I kissed him on both cheeks and stroked his hair.

“Neither my mother nor I were surprised to learn that the sneaky Shapiro had left 90 per cent of his fortune to the Zionist organization that was lobbying for the founding of Israel in 1947. The remainder of the inheritance was to be shared between us and the city's three synagogues. There were some interesting provisions in the will. Although we could receive interest on the United States government bonds, we were not allowed to sell them before their date of maturity. The proceeds were earmarked for three things: the purchase of an apartment in New York, the establishment of a business, and the completion of my Master's degree. Later I understood that these were precautions to keep my father, an ambitious man, from endangering our future.

“We moved to New York in 1946 as soon as I graduated from law school, which I entered on my father's insistence. Judging from the money he bequeathed us, Grandpa Shapiro thought that an apartment in Brooklyn would be sufficient. At the end of the summer I signed up for English-language courses at New York University. The next year I took my second undergraduate degree. My father still hadn't found a job, but we didn't complain. The precious-stone market was in the hands of a few ruthless Jewish merchants, and the mood of pessimism the war had left behind hadn't yet dissipated. The month I started an M.B.A. at N.Y.U., my father founded an import-export business with the wishy-washy son-in-law of an antique dealer he'd met at the synagogue. At first they imported glass souvenirs from Venice and watches from Switzerland. They made money selling the watches wholesale to institutional buyers. The week I took my third and last degree the pair had a falling-out. My father had put in an order at a very low price but without having lined up customers for the goods, though apparently he had received certain assurances. When the customers failed to materialize he was left holding the bag. He made drastic efforts to save his reputation. We managed to unload a third of the shipment at home and in Canada. For the rest of the stock my father chose a strange target – Tokyo. And I was the one to go there, alone …