Many and Many a Year Ago (20 page)

He cannot pull himself together after his wife's death. He increases his alcohol intake and looks for chances to challenge the people around him. Unable to fall in love again, he attempts to commit suicide. He completes the poems of his mature period; he is forced to go on the lecture circuit to make money. (On the last page of his notebook he writes, “Eagerly to feel the approach of a gray tunnel.”) He was forty when they found him groaning on a Baltimore back street one foggy autumn morning. There are several explanations for his death. Even I wouldn't know why the clothes he had on when they brought him to the hospital were not his …

Master, I discovered your work when I was in middle school, and by the time I was a lycée student had memorized it all. I enthusiastically followed your footsteps to the University of Virginia 170 years behind you. I may well have been to every place you stepped foot in between Richmond and Boston. In Charlottesville there was an antique shop called “Vintagia” on the edge of the university campus. In this place, which had a lot of things from the nineteenth century, my attention was drawn to a black hard-cover notebook. Its yellowing pages contained certain codes that had been formed by combining Latin and Greek letters and double-digit numbers. The writer had the dexterous hands of a calligrapher. The notebook had the charm of a holograph manuscript. I seized it eagerly and rushed home. As I cracked the codes with a kind of divine exultation I could not of course have foreseen that this would change my life. What made the hair on my head stand up was the suspicion that the notebook, encompassing reactions to certain literary and socioeconomic agendas which in turn provoked aphorisms and prophecies regarding the future, might actually be yours. Yet the last entry, in the year of your departure from earth, coincided perfectly with the anecdote about “the lost suitcase in Richmond.” I was elated to realize that your biographies had missed the substance of your inner world, which was protected by these codes. I did not feel like announcing the presence of this notebook to the world at large. It was my happy destiny to be the one and only creature on this perishable earth who had managed to decode you. As it imprinted itself on my brain line by line, I was at the same time crushed by the awareness of your genius. I felt as if I were entrusted with “the book of immortality,” and that if I failed to do what had to be done, I would incur your wrath, O Master!

I threw myself into the labyrinth of intellectual coordinates such as heaven/hell, past/future, and day/night and made them my own. By the time I emerged from this cul-de-sac I had become a Poe character myself. To do justice to my role it was necessary to become financially powerful and never to remove the cloak of mystery
.

You broadened the horizons of thousands of writers, beginning with masters like Walt Whitman, William Faulkner, Herman Melville, Flannery O'Connor, Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarmé, Paul Valéry, Marcel Proust, W. H. Auden, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Robert L. Stevenson, George B. Shaw, Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov, Arthur C. Doyle, Jorge Louis Borges, and Julio Cortázar. You saved the book world from being overrun by sentimental novels and academic critics. You widened the horizons of hundreds of millions of people. Furthermore, no love poem has surpassed “Annabel Lee” for the last 150 years
.

I am moreover well aware of your use of mystery as a tool in “the dispensation of justice.” In 2009, on the 200th anniversary of your birth, I am determined to settle accounts on your behalf, O Master!

Your servant
,

S.A
.

Why was this letter addressed to Poe? Was it perhaps written when Suat was a student to prove his admiration for his master's ghost, or more recently to confuse me?

As I finished this letter, I remembered the abridged Poe stories we had read on our English courses. I would have to study his Master's longer stories and essays to determine how far Suat's psycho-manifestation had exaggerated the facts.

The passionate move of my right hand toward the notebook in grayish-red leather startled me. Like a tentative periscope I surveyed the room. I stood and picked out a Branford Marsalis CD, and as “The Ruby and the Pearl” began to fill the room, cautiously lifted the cover on the notebook. The lines, “If I went I wouldn't know it / Not even my shadow can come along” used as a preface seemed superficial. I followed the parade of Poe characters on the light pink pages. Every drawing looked like it was waiting, to be certified as a graphic-novel hero. Detective Auguste Dupin was endowed with two different expressions so that he resembled both Poe and Suat. I came up with the inane idea that if Suat's life were made into a film, he would be played by Johnny Depp. After drawings of tigers, gorillas, and wild birds there was an innocent section in which, I think, all the alphabetical letters in the history of civilization were listed from top to bottom. They danced like the designs on a naturally dyed kilim. As I brought them together before my eyes, they seemed to escape from the page with the speed of light.

The third section consisted of place names written in different colors with a ballpoint pen. Apart from Aden, Artvin, Auckland, and Bhutan I had never heard of them, but I wasn't concerned. There was a red circle around Serendipity (Serendip). I resorted to the Internet: the word “Serendipity” had Persian roots and meant “while questing for one beauty to run into another.” “Serendip,” on the other hand, was the legendary name of Sri Lanka. With relief and deep satisfaction at having discovered Suat's base, I stood and took a short victory tour of the house. But the meaninglessness of my discovery soon sank in, and I came back to my desk and plunged into the final section of the notebook, which was called “Haiku-Sized Stories.”

Miniature poems in Japanese were called haiku, weren't they? I scanned the sixth one in the collection of seventy-seven:

Dr. B., who stumbled upon his hunchbacked older brother and his wife kissing, discovered the next morning when he woke up that all his hair had turned white. After the divorce, he left the country. He moved happily to Ushuaia, the birthplace of the mulatto Argentinian nurse whom he met in Vancouver and married. This quiet town was the closest spot on the continent to the South Pole. On the day his young wife broke the happy news that she was pregnant he received another piece of news regarding an accident: a van on a Patagonia expedition had fallen into a ravine and two people were seriously injured. The tourist couple ended up in Dr. B's operating room fighting for their lives. They were his ex-wife and his brother, who had funded his medical education. Owing to hospital conditions and the shortage of time, he would be able to save only one of them …

I must confess that the characters whom I encountered in the passages I hastily read grew on me. The fact that in almost all of them a justice prevailed that was beyond God's own reminded me of something that Suat—as Fuat—had once said to me. Suat had been discharged from the army just forty-eight hours before the driver who had killed his father was found dead in his taxi. I was grappling with the rising tension in the stories. I would have to finish them on the journey I felt I would soon be taking.

Next I took up a worn diary covered in blue plastic. It was clear that this nosegay-of-days composed in the Cyrillic alphabet had been Vlad Nadolsky's. Once Suat had had this document—a month-by-month chronicle of the period from 1917 to 1987—translated into Turkish, he possessed all the information he needed to send me on my mini Anatolian tour. Wedged in the back cover of the thick diary were two photographs taken perhaps sixty years before depicting Haluk and his patron arm in arm. I saw in Count Nadolsky's attractive face a calmness deriving from the final acceptance of the state of exile. These photographs, and the musty diary, were temptation enough to visit Haluk once again. It was too late to worry about the fact that they'd been planted in the library while I was in Buenos Aires.

“SERENDIPITY,” the front cover of the CD proclaimed; and on the back was written, “This is not Sri Lanka.” I smiled ruefully when I realized that Suat had foreseen how easily I would be sucked in. Eagerly I inserted the disk into the player; the soundless images ran for twenty minutes. First Suat tried to impress me with footage of his compound shot from ground level and then from the air. Within this private world, separated from the outer world by high stone walls, there were: a postmodern chateau, a forest of trees I did not recognize, an artificial lake with a dock, and three rows of outbuildings. The swaggering postures adopted by a cluster of security guards at the main entrance were frightening. Suat was swimming in a pool of sharks and stingrays and tugging a horrific gorilla along the bank of the lake on a leash. The entry hall of his opulent mansion was bristling with busts and portraits of Poe. Then the dining room scene: at the table, among Suat's Japanese and Negro advisers, sat an attractive young mulatto girl. Their eyes were shadowed with fear. At first I thought the object on Suat's left was a porcelain statue. It turned out to be, however, a Siberian tiger that licked Suat's hand whenever he extended it. The huge creature was sitting motionless, eyes half closed, as if it wanted to avoid disturbing the others at the table. Following this series of self-promotional images, the final statement on the screen—“Imagination, thoughtlessness, yearning for solitude, belittling the present while nourishing an intense passion for the future: my life has been about nothing else”—must have belonged to Edgar A. Poe.

I got a bottle of beer from the fridge. I felt like watching the DVD again, but I couldn't, though I tried more than once: the recording had erased itself. It reminded me of
Mission Impossible
. An acute pain sprang up on the left side of my head. I stood and opened the window and focused on the view of the Golden Horn. I waited until the distant siren of an ambulance disappeared into silence. As I withdrew from the window I felt the satisfaction of a decision reached: in accordance with the wishes of Suat, the Master of Mystery, I would visit Haluk and meet his blind granddaughter.

Ali and Esther Uzel came home to Istanbul for good and I was spared from traveling to C. in the hellish August heat. I took great pleasure in watching them move into the Maçka house. It seemed they would never tire of one another. When I said, “I can't visualize you as husband and wife,” Esther giggled and replied, “I hope God made you say that.” The professor informed me that he intended to keep his Balat flat empty; I was delighted. At the beginning of September the Uzels went off to Heybeliada to spend two weeks in a friend's villa, and I prepared for my Ayvalık trip.

I needn't have bothered looking up the so-called lawyer on the Internet merely to note the global rhyme between the names “Suat” and “Stuart.” I called Haluk Erçelik at the number on the crumpled card he'd given me and delivered my prepared speech without faltering. I knew he would be dubious on hearing that I'd found Count Nadolsky's diaries, and I knew he would be suspicious on hearing that I'd brought CDs—sorrowful but not depressing—from Buenos Aires for Sim. He said, “This time I'm not going to let you go before we have a good sit-down at the
raki
table.” I recalled an old saying that went something like, “He's following me, and he doesn't like it that I'm doubling back on my own trail.”

The wheezing bus to Ayvalık wasn't full. I was glad to find that Ayvalık had lost its excess tourist weight, but I felt the heart of my gladness evaporate immediately. When we got to the terminal the late-afternoon
ezan
was in the air, which warmed my heart, but when the hotel receptionist greeted me for the second time in English I was annoyed. I restrained myself from asking, in my sternest voice, why their establishment didn't smell of olive oil.

Together with the adventurous Pasadeos couple from Mytilene whom I met in the lobby, I crossed over the next day to neighboring Cunda Island. These retired teachers' purpose in coming here was to buy a new wardrobe. I told them that I was a classical-music DJ at an Istanbul radio station. They told me that the best
mezes
in the whole of the Aegean region were to be found at the Bay Nihat fish restaurant. I paid our check, grateful not to be asked why I wasn't yet married. On the way back the smell of olive oil overwhelmed the center of town. It sobered me up slightly. In my room I began reading
Old Love
by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Its cover depicted a pair of Jewish lovers in their eighties, hand in hand. I attributed the plain language of the Nobel laureate to his being a rabbi's son. The arithmetical organization of his sentence structure reminded me of Bach, which made me in turn think of Ariel. And as the bandoneon melodies rising heavily from the southern hemisphere besieged my soul, I fell asleep.

Haluk told me to drop by in the late afternoon, so after breakfast I paid a visit to the neighboring town, Bergama, which Konstantin Pasadeos once declared “Rome's rival” as a center of culture. Inhaling the antique perfume radiated by the objects in the Archeology Museum, I wished I were in bed for a good long sleep. On the way to C., I finished the Singer book. The dark-haired driver, who kept even his name to himself, looked like he was about to cry when I offered him a generous tip. As the gate to the olive grove opened, Arrow barked twice and the distant sound of a
ney
fell silent. Climbing the footpath, I wondered if it was Nalan who had selected its jewel-like pebbles. As I followed the trail of shining geometrical stones, I encountered all the compositions I had admired from childhood to ennui, from Bach to Adamo.

Haluk was waiting for me on the veranda behind the stone house, sitting at a table piled high with food, like a chess player with his first three moves prepared. In addition to the usual
raki
table
mezes
, there were delicacies of the region like spicy olive paste, seaweed, and nettle pastry. I took mental note for Professor Ali. I would have been skeptical about Haluk's kissing me on the cheek had his breath not reeked of anise. He could not conceal his joy as he took the Nadolsky diaries from me and said, “This means you've found the twisted maniac who played that bad joke on you.”