After the lunch, I came home to tell my mother, exaggerating the trouble the aunts had gone to, that this was one of the most thoughtful things anyone had ever done for me.
I knew how to hurt her, too. So slyly you could hardly point to it.
“I didn’t realize you would enjoy something like that,” my mother said. “I thought you preferred to be alone with your friends.”
43.
When I returned to Istanbul from Paris, returned here for good, that is, others were already leaving. I had been in touch with several high school friends who told me they were getting ready to move abroad, or searching for a way to do so.
“We’re running away,” they said. “This is no place to live.”
It hurt me to hear them talking about the city like this.
The dangerous city, the tiring city, the dubious city.
Our Istanbul had become an unwanted place.
They were married, some had children; they watched their careers sway this way and that in the new political climate. They were sad that it had come to this, but they had their futures to think of. In Istanbul, they said, there was no knowing what would happen next.
And there was no denying what they said was true.
44.
Here’s something else M. wrote to me. I read it many times:
“I don’t think I will ever get tired of your stories.”
I wrote back to say that this sounded like an easy challenge.
(To be clear, his words made me happy. But I realize now that I had a way of sweeping away these moments casually, not giving in to my happiness.)
“Not a challenge,” M. said. “Only a sincere observation.”
In my notebook, I had a list of things I wrote down to tell him later. The shopkeeper touching her earlobe to check her gold earring; the smell of the metro rising from grills on the pavement; the old woman at Café du Coin who ate her dessert every afternoon with her free hand hovering protectively over the plate, as if someone might take it away from her.
I made lists of foods, films, trees, in the way I had learned from M.’s novels, and I told them to him in the detached manner of his narrators. In this way, the people in my stories—my mother, the aunts, my child self—took on lives of their own, treading a separate path than their earthly twins. And M. was always delighted.
But I had already begun to wonder how long I could keep up this friendship with its stock of inconsequential details, and how long M. would enjoy reading my stories, which I wrote mimicking his style.
A few times, we met close to Gare du Nord and I showed him places around my neighborhood—the Saint-Quentin market, the ivy-covered plaza behind boulevard de Magenta—so that I could be in charge of our walk. I took M. to a Turkish restaurant by the Porte Saint-Denis, and ordered for us in Turkish.
“It’s such a pleasure to hear you speak,” M. said.
On another walk, I brought us to Café du Coin, as if we’d just happened upon it. I didn’t tell M. that this was where I lived.
“I sometimes come here, because it’s nice and quiet,” I said.
M. remarked that I knew my way around those streets like the back of my hand.
I acted familiarly with the young waiter, and he returned the gesture, smiling at me broadly. When we were ordering, he winked and asked if “mademoiselle” would have hot chocolate with her meal.
Whenever I interacted with men my age, M. seemed different. Sadder, I suppose. Or apologetic. This made me even more fond of him.
But from time to time, he would say something that defied the unspoken rules of our friendship, and his shyness, which I liked so much, would disappear.
“My wife used to love rosé wine, just like you,” he said one afternoon, when we were having lunch at our bistro. “And its alluring color certainly suited her.”
Another time, after I crossed the street and we exchanged our usual greeting, he said, without a hint of the usual stammering tone, that I looked lovely.
“Of course that’s no news to you,” he added, “you always look lovely.”
But these were rare instances.
* * *
—
One afternoon, while we were walking in front of Notre-Dame towards the flower market, M. steered us away from the plaza all the way to the other side and stopped to look at the cathedral from a distance. There was such harmony in the arrangement, he said. The craftsmen had never lost track of what they were doing. He pointed from left to right at the prophets, the kings, the apostles, the life of the Virgin.
Until then, I had only seen the front of Notre-Dame from close up and looked at the hundreds of stone faces, which seemed cluttered and without much order. I went back the following day and examined the façade carefully. The next time that we walked in front of the cathedral, I pointed out a cluster of leaves, St. Anne’s sturdy hands, the marble book with blank pages, a wreath of acorns.
“The world in your step,” M. wrote that evening, listing all the things I had shown him, “has more colors in its rainbow.” But I didn’t tell him then, nor on any other occasion, that he had taught me something new about seeing this world.
It could be tiring to create these worlds for M., for only a moment’s worth of gratification. I was constantly collecting things to show him, reading about historical curiosities, memorizing lines of poetry or the unusual details of a building or bridge, and even learning feats of engineering that I would then mention offhandedly in conversation. And each time that M. expressed admiration for my wealth of knowledge and my ability to notice such minute details, I brushed his comments off as if to say that these were nothing to cause attention. This may have been my retaliation for all the times M. looked at his watch and told me he had to get going. I, too, wanted to show him that I had my places to go, that I had been places.
45.
“It’s you we worry about,” the aunts say. They say it every Sunday when I take them to the plaza for tea. “The city’s screw has come loose.”
But they worry about themselves, too.
“Just look at Kanlıca. This used to be a modern neighborhood.”
They tell me they feel like foreigners in their own home and soon they’ll be pushed out, no doubt. They have no idea where all these people have descended from, ignorant and angry, disregarding everyone else.
“No comfort in our own home,” they say. “It’s like an infestation.”
It’s the same conversation each time. Perhaps this is what they need to soothe their fears. Everyone, it seems, has a story to tell these days. Even if the stories are different, each is as fearful as the next.
46.
That year in Paris, part of the quays on the Right Bank leading down from Hôtel de Ville were closed to traffic. It seemed to me at the time that I would never be able to see Paris as it really was. Things were always under construction or repair. A dome, a church, a plaza, or a fountain was always hidden behind scaffolding. Recalling this now in Istanbul, it all seems so innocent, when our entire city has been dug up to build anew.
Not many people had noticed that the quays were closed to traffic, or they simply didn’t change their routines, because this stretch was mostly empty. M. and I went down there to sit on a stone bench and watch the river, which had risen dramatically by late spring. Each time, M. took something out of his bag for us to eat.
“I think I have a little something,” he said, as if he had just remembered, even though I knew he must have prepared it for our walk.
He would bring out thyme and cheese pastries from a Lebanese vendor in his neighborhood as well as a bottle of juice. I sometimes brought fruits or a bag of nuts and we spread the food between us on the bench.
We called these our “midnight picnics” in reference to Akif amca’s poem, and without apparent reason, because we only went there during the day.
On one picnic, M. told me ab
out an uncle who lived in America and was a heroic figure in M.’s childhood, not least because of the presents he brought on every visit. It was this same uncle who had given M. his first typewriter and encouraged him to write. A Remington model, M. remembered, whose N key made a whirring sound. (Sometimes I felt that he was testing his memory with our conversations. If he slipped, I wouldn’t suspect a thing, and he could continue adding color to faded corners, inventing details for whatever eluded him.)
On the last day of the visits, the uncle would pull M. aside and give him what seemed at the time a generous amount of money. He told M. to do as he pleased with this cash, and not bother telling his parents. On one such occasion, after the uncle returned to America, M. went to the pie shop downtown and ordered ten mince pies. He hadn’t been able to eat them all, and perhaps he even knew this when he made his order. He guessed, too, that even though his uncle had told him to do as he pleased, he would nevertheless have been surprised by M.’s choice. But this was one of the most wonderful moments of his childhood, M. said. It was not the pleasure of eating, he told me, while we sat with our picnic stretched between us on the bench, but the freedom to do as he wanted. Perhaps, he added, that is also why he wrote.
But most of the time we sat in silence and looked at the water. Sometimes I would look over at M. and he would nod his head up and down, as if he were agreeing with something. I didn’t know whether this gesture meant, “You see? You see?” or if he were telling me, “I know, I know.”
47.
Before she started going to school, my mother would pack a schoolbag and go over to Akif amca’s. He showed her how to spell the names of all her family members. My mother sat at the table, carefully writing out her exercises, and from time to time Akif amca rattled the contents of a drawer and said that it was the recess bell.
It is remarkable how ordinary this story is and how devotedly my mother told it.
“I sat across from him doing the work he gave me, and from time to time he rang the recess bell.”
What is remarkable is that my mother cared enough about these stories to repeat them.
“At recess, he tied cloth dolls to his fingers and bounced them about, making me laugh.”
When I was a child, I understood clearly and without judgment that my mother told stories about Akif amca because he had loved her abundantly.
But later, I found it pathetic that she still held on to these scraps.
* * *
—
One time when I was in high school, we watched a movie about another mother and daughter. They slept in the same room and chatted under the covers at night. There was a montage of all the things they did together—walking into photo booths at train stations, cycling in parks, baking pies, having food fights. By the time we became aware of the movie’s sentimentality it was too late to turn it off and we watched, embarrassed of each other, until the end.
Afterwards, we continued sitting in the living room without speaking. A new movie came on. Then my mother said, “You know, Nunu, I would go to Akif amca’s and pretend that it was a classroom. Did I ever tell you about that?”
I shrugged, pretending to be engrossed in a magazine I’d picked up from the coffee table.
“Actually,” she continued, “I always thought of Akif amca as just my playmate, but I think that he was also a very good poet.
“Really,” she said. “Next time we’re in Aldere we should look at his notebooks. I’m sure you’ll be surprised.”
I told her I doubted it.
Much later, when I told stories of my mother to Luke, I didn’t want to remember anything that might contradict the character I’d created. But I remember now that she was trying, my mother, to find a way to reach me.
48.
For a long time into our knowing each other, several weeks, perhaps some months, M. did not say my name out loud. And as if to make up for it, he wrote it often in his e-mails, sometimes in succession, playing around with the syllables and composing new meanings: “Nurunisa, Nur-u-nisa, Nur. Nisa.” I guessed that he might be uncertain about its pronunciation, even more so because he was embarrassed when I sometimes corrected the way he said a Turkish word, as if I had caught him telling a lie. I don’t know why he preferred my full name, even though I had told him that everybody called me Nunu. Even my mother, who rarely granted me childishness, preferred this small word to the old-fashioned name given to me by my father.
I respected M.’s care with words and I resented it. When we came upon a beautiful sight, I would want him to say something that revealed the workings of his imagination. We crossed the river at sunset many times, when the colors gathered and deepened and the sky descended lower onto the city. This sky always made M. pause and I waited for him to speak. But he only stated what I could also see—“Look at the orange tip of that cloud,” or “What a mottled sky”—before continuing.
The first time he said my name, we were standing beneath the arcades across from the Senate. At one end was one of the first meter sticks in the city. I had discovered it on my own some days before, when I happened to take shelter from the rain there, and I had brought M. to the same spot to show him.
This was the only meter stick, I had learned, that was still in its original place after the switch to the metric system, when several others were installed around Paris. There was something interesting to me about this, even sad, though I guessed that M. might not immediately see what was so special in a regular meter. I would point out to him the poetry in this simple line drawn on marble: one hundred centimeters on a white wall marking with precision the new order of the city. It was the type of thing Akif amca might have noted in his journal—at least the Akif amca I told M. about, whenever we discussed my Thracian project.
I fiddled with my camera, pretending to focus on the shadows falling diagonally all the way across the arcade. I was waiting for M. to walk towards the meter so that I could tell him about it as I had planned.
I must not have heard that he asked me something. When I didn’t reply, he said my name. Perhaps he noticed my expression as I looked up, because he quickly asked whether he was pronouncing it correctly. It was a question one would ask a stranger. He added that he admired the musicality of my name and was afraid to ruin it with his “terrible accent.”
I raised the camera to my eyes and pointed it at him. He took a few steps back, so that he was perfectly positioned in front of the white wall, the meter stretching out from either side of his neck.
For some time, I looked at him through the viewfinder, watching his face. He looked down to the ground, then looked up again, waiting for me to take the photo.
I watched for a while longer in the comfortable distance, behind the lens.
“Nurunisa?” he said again.
I took the photograph and put the camera down, just as he leaned back and smiled for the picture.
It’s the only one I have of him.
49.
Some evenings, my mother went over to Akif amca’s and sat on the floor, in front of the stove by the armchair. While Akif amca read, my mother would draw, or lie on her back and stare at the ceiling. Before he sent my mother back home, Akif amca wound his watch. He told my mother to listen, bringing the watch to his ear, and the two of them held their breaths to hear the sound. Akif amca told my mother that it was rushing to make up for all the lost time. I loved this story and brought my own watch to my ear often during my childhood, listening to the hurrying time.
I asked my mother about this one evening when we were looking through old photographs. This was later, that year I was back in Istanbul. I asked my mother many things in those months, to make up for all the lost time.
I’d realized that I didn’t really know what Akif amca’s words had meant. I didn’t even know whether I remembered the story of the watch correctly or if I had forgotten one of the key moments that tied the pieces together.
In
one picture, Akif amca was sitting in his armchair with his legs crossed.
“Remember when Akif amca wound his watch? What would he tell you?”
“What do you mean?” my mother said.
“When he asked you to listen,” I said.
My mother said I must be remembering incorrectly. She had never told me this.
But I was certain that she must have forgotten her own story and was even pleased that I now had full ownership of it. I thought that maybe Akif amca had not known the meaning of these words either and was equally enchanted by their elusive poetry.
It was only when I moved to Paris and began looking through the journal for things to tell M. about my Thracian project that I realized Akif amca had been remembering his own lines.
A moment after the invention
the city rushes, to make up for lost time.
50.
Here is something else I learned from M.
In ancient memory exercises, students are advised to place whatever they want to remember inside the chambers of an imaginary building. The building must be spacious and symmetrical and students must shape their memories into striking images and place them one by one inside the evenly spaced rooms.
The solitary walker of this building will doubtless have to distort the memories in order to recall them. Sometimes, the most tedious facts will become marvelous in their unusual forms, displayed in these memory palaces.
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