Some walkers, M. said, must have been moved by the sights in their own minds, entirely different from their familiar and mundane counterparts in the world. Some must even have wanted to excavate them back out into daylight by committing them to paper, to marble, to walls.
M. sometimes referred to our shared memory palace, where the two of us had invented our own times of day (he always found a different way to bring up “The Invention of Midnight”). The rooms of this building, he said, which contained replicas of the most unremarkable sights, had turned into treasures.
“Don’t you think so as well?” he wrote. I was touched by this hopeful question. I can’t remember what I wrote back. I don’t always have the heart to go back and read my own responses. I didn’t think at the time that I was constantly avoiding M.’s words—the very ones that made me happy. I would have said I was waiting for the next note, adding each one to my collection, though it must certainly have appeared as if I were pushing the words away.
This idea of a palace has stayed with me, even if I believe it is too neatly constructed to shed light on the devious ways of memory. Its innocent sleight of hand is only in the amplification of what is remembered, when the truth has so much more to do with hiding and forgetting.
* * *
—
Often as we walked, there were things I remembered fully and in an instant. A childhood joke, the smell of coal in winter, the way a rusty box opens with a slight twist, at a particular spot. I didn’t keep a record of all these things, and some I’ve now forgotten. What’s left of the memory is only the knowledge that I’m no longer in possession of something I once knew intimately. It is useless, this residue of absence.
After I moved back to Istanbul—moved back for good—I ran into M. at every corner. I saw him on the ferry, at the juice and burger stands, in coffeehouses along the water. Sometimes, when I look at his photograph, at the raised eyebrows, the scar rising dramatically, I can hardly remember who he was. But every time I caught a glimpse of him in the stares and stoops of strangers, I would know him in an instant.
51.
Before that year I spent with my mother, I had told her that I would never come back to Istanbul. I had my own reasons, something that grew bigger inside me. I have called it silence, even if it made itself known with words.
And there was something else, which felt at the time like confidence, in the life I’d created in London, among people who saw me differently. I thought that I had put things in order and that I could keep them in balance, so long as I kept a distance.
On the phone one evening, my mother told me we should go to the Borsa Restaurant when I came to visit. It had recently been renovated, she said. Did I remember that restaurant inside the Adile Sultan Pavilion? There is such a view of the Judas trees in the spring that it takes your breath away.
“Do you remember, Nunu, you and I went there before?”
Another time she said, “Do you remember our fish lunches?”
What I resented most was not so much the question as the meekness, that false note of sweetness that was not my mother’s. At the time, I could not hear her plea.
“As soon as you come back,” she said on the phone, “I’m going to take you to the Adile Sultan Pavilion.”
“I’m not coming back to Istanbul,” I told her.
“Of course, I understand. You should be focusing on your future,” my mother said.
“That’s not it,” I said. I had been practicing what I would say.
“I’m not coming back because I’m learning to forgive and to forget.”
* * *
—
It is the stuff of fiction that a single conversation can change the course of a life; that we will return to it again and again, wishing to undo it. Even if we could, so much would remain. There are many ways of hurting, without words. It’s silence that shapes us.
My mother must have known about her illness then and she may have felt relief at my words. And I want to say, without an attempt to comfort or pardon myself, that I was so wrapped up in the story I’d been telling Luke, coloring my own memories, that my mother may not even have understood what I was talking about.
52.
After we moved from Moda to the new apartment, on the nights she did not come to stand at my door, I would go to her.
“Nejla,” I called from the threshold, but she didn’t respond.
I never told Luke about that, all those evenings he and I sat on our quilted bed.
She lived in her own world, I said, far from reality.
I would shake my head as if I had no words for what I felt. Sometimes, I told Luke, my mother would not speak to me for days.
And I was just a child. “Imagine doing that to a child,” I would say, bringing tears to my eyes.
Luke might reach over and squeeze my hand.
“You poor Buddyback,” he said.
But what I didn’t tell him was something far simpler. I would go to my mother’s bedroom and call to her from the door. The room would be very dark and my mother would be in terrible pain from one of her headaches. I wouldn’t say anything else as I quietly went back to my room.
53.
Looking at the photograph of M. now, I see something new in his expression. Perhaps because it has been several years since that afternoon when we went to see the meter stick beneath the arcades. Today, what I see is neither bewilderment nor annoyance, but expectation. M. is looking at me with anticipation. If only I were to focus, I might be able to see what M. saw when he looked at me.
* * *
—
We used to sit in the courtyard of a museum behind the Montparnasse station, converted from the studio of a nineteenth-century sculptor whom M. admired—one of many artists in Paris whose traces were more or less washed away with time, which I think was the very reason for M.’s interest in him. (“Another Apollodorus,” we might have called him.) M. had even shown me a book of this sculptor’s class notes, which were the transcripts of studio hours when he walked from student to student, pointing out the flaws and strengths in their work, calling their attention to forms they may have missed. These conversations, M. said, with only the words to outline the sculptures in the studio, gave him a pleasure akin to reading a ghost story.
I enjoyed being among the marble crowd of statues, which were mostly reworkings of the same three figures, with pained, serious, or ambivalent expressions. The slight reiterations in their gestures and even clothing created new meaning in each new cast. But the sculptor, M. said, had told the same story his whole life. He said this often, not just about this particular sculptor, but about all artists he admired. In M.’s opinion, these artists told the same story again and again, and unlike Luke, he meant it as a compliment.
One time, as we were leaving, I noticed a sculpture of a naked woman, different from all the others. She had wide hips, and her stone hair was collected on her head in a soft pile. One leg was crossed over the other, a pose that echoed her mischievous smile. In one hand, she was holding an apple, as if it were a ball she was about to throw up in the air.
She was playful with her fruit and her loosely gathered hair, totally unlike the troubled faces around her. It gave me such pleasure to look at her that I stood in front of her for some time, smiling back, jealous, I suppose, of a piece of stone.
After a while, M. came and stood next to me and I realized that I had crossed my legs just like the statue. He didn’t say anything, and I kept standing as I had been before, but I felt I was becoming, like the marble, very stiff and that my face and throat were burning.
54.
I’ve made it a habit to leave my apartment a bit early on my way to work each morning. I stop to have tea at a bakery or sit in a park. There are the shopkeepers of Moda who know me by name now. Some call out greetings to me on my way.
For hours at a time each day, I forget that I live in Ista
nbul. At work, I write about other cities—more beautiful, less troubled. At least one section of every issue of the magazine is dedicated to an unrivaled capital of the world. St. Petersburg, Paris, Florence, Amsterdam. These cities offer readers the surest way to escape their lives for the span of a few pages. They are beautiful, through and through, without anything to hide.
And then there are those waiting to be discovered, waking up after years of hardship, newly bustling: Tbilisi, Warsaw, Riga.
I’ve become accustomed to summing them up—plazas, cathedrals, restaurants, myths—packing them tight with charm, inventing superlatives.
“You make me want to go there,” Esra often says across the desk from mine. She’s the youngest at the magazine. She’s never lived anywhere else. “Anyway,” she says, “anyplace is bound to be better than here.”
I tell her she may be right. I don’t want to seem foreign to my colleagues; to marvel like a tourist at the city we should all have had enough of by now.
After completing each issue, we celebrate at the bar across the street, raising our glasses to the same toast: “To travel,” one of us says, and the others respond, “To getting the hell out!”
55.
I eventually learned that one of the “tasks” keeping M. from devoting all his time to the new book was teaching writing, because I sometimes met him after his class at the university. We’d walk from there down the avenue Bosquet towards Invalides. On those afternoons, when I saw him emerge from the building and descend the stone steps, he appeared like another person, even if he still wore his green jacket and stooped slightly. Sometimes he was with a colleague or with one of his students, and he parted with them cheerfully at the bottom of the steps before crossing the street to greet me with his raised hand. I wonder if I had seen him incorrectly all this time—this stammering man I described.
On those days, M. always had something to tell me about his classes. He took his students’ struggles to heart, and worried that he would not be able to teach them to write authentically. He was troubled, he told me one time, by the difficulty of making his students understand the difference between art and artifice. He said that what the students thought of as style was an unwillingness to tell a story. He wondered whether he was only teaching them the illusory mechanics of craft, by which they could conceal the absence at the heart of their writing, trying to make up for all the things they were not able to confront. I nodded in agreement, but I wondered, feeling uneasy and embarrassed, whether M. was trying to tell me something in his particular way.
56.
On Bayram morning (it must have been the first one since I had come to Paris), I called Saniye and Asuman. They were sad I was spending it alone.
“All alone in those places,” they said, the way anyplace outside of Istanbul became plural when it signified separation, as if to underline the impossibility of reaching across the vast distance. I told them they shouldn’t worry. I was enjoying myself in Paris, I was learning a lot, I was writing.
I had even met someone, I said. He was a writer, and he wrote books about Istanbul. Until then, during our brief phone conversations, I had not mentioned M.
I told them that M. was a famous writer, knowing they gave importance to such things.
“Is he your teacher from school?” they asked. They didn’t know I hadn’t been to classes.
“No,” I said. “Just a friend. But we go on walks and we talk about writing.”
“Where do you walk?” Saniye said.
“All around the city. We have so much to talk about.”
“What does this man want from you?” Asuman asked. “What does a grown man want from a young girl, who isn’t a writer or anything?”
* * *
—
Stories have their own logic. For one thing, a story can only be told once it has an ending. For another, it builds, and then unravels. Each element of a story is essential; its time will come and it will ultimately mean something. In this way, stories are accountable, because they can look you in the eye.
57.
Akif amca had met James Baldwin in Istanbul during an engagement party at the house of two actors. Baldwin arrived uninvited, my mother told me, and even though I didn’t know at the time who he was, I still liked this story of an uninvited guest, perhaps for no other reason than my mother telling me a story.
“The black writer James Baldwin,” my mother informed me, nevertheless. Then she added, “Who knows how much of this is true.” According to Akif amca, people called him “Jimmy the Arab,” with the old-world ignorance at a time when Ethiopian nannies to wealthy Istanbul families were called “Arab sisters.” I wrote about this to M. It was exactly the type of thing that would delight him.
(“The simplest one of your stories,” M. once wrote to me, “is more intriguing than all the bohemians in Paris.”)
I can’t say for certain when I began to boast to M. with the stories I told him. Perhaps it was when we finally dropped the pretense that I was writing a novel about Akif amca, the poet. Little by little, we stopped talking about my project, and M. no longer asked whether I had made any progress in my search for the poet’s traces in Paris. But he told me often that I was lucky to have such a wealth of stories at my disposal.
It distressed me to think that M. might have known all along that I’d never intended to write a book about Akif amca, and had only used it as an excuse to become his friend, and tell him stories that weren’t quite mine.
Whatever the reason, there was a time when I began to insist that I knew the Istanbul of M.’s books more intimately than he did. This vanished city full of unexpected crossings and a poetic sadness.
I had finally told M. that I’d read one of his novels. I’d come across it at the bookshop where we’d first met, I said, and couldn’t resist the temptation.
M. waved his hand in the air, embarrassed, as if he wanted to dismiss the conversation. That modest gesture prompted me to add that I had, in fact, loved the book.
But later, I began to point out small details he’d missed; particularities of the time period he seemed unaware of. I tried to make my comments sound generous, as if I was telling him all this to enrich his world. M. listened to me without objection. He even thanked me.
* * *
—
The story continued that Baldwin had fallen asleep on the lap of one of the guests. When he woke up, he went to the kitchen and sat at the table to write amidst harried maids assembling platters of fruit.
This was when Akif amca met him, coming through the kitchen to go out to the balcony. Baldwin followed him out, with two glasses of tea. Akif amca recalled the way he held the glass at the rim, with his long fingers. The two men shared a cigarette, watching the city.
Akif amca waited for Baldwin to say something about the view. He wondered what a foreigner thought of Istanbul; whether he found it as beautiful as he did. But Baldwin sipped his tea and looked out at the hills with darting eyes, and from time to time he reached over to take the cigarette from Akif amca.
There was something peculiar about the way my mother told me about the two men on the balcony, which is why I remember it so well.
“Who knows if any of it is true,” she said again, the way she sometimes did with resentment, as if she were accusing Akif amca for the stories with which he had filled her happy childhood.
“At the end of his life,” my mother said some time later, telling me about Akif amca waiting for Baldwin to praise his city, “this remarkable man’s only friend would be a child.
“Poor Akif amca,” she said, “standing on that balcony.”
* * *
—
I’d felt envy for Akif amca and the love my mother had for him.
* * *
—
Several days after I wrote to M. about this moment on the balcony, I realized that my description of Baldwin’s darting
eyes was something I had read in one of M.’s novels, in his passage about the old man watching the city hills. I realized that my phrasing was almost word for word M.’s description of his character. I’d read that scene many times; I even read it to my mother when she was ill—when the old man stands on a balcony looking out at the city spread on the hills.
I didn’t write to M. for several days because I felt embarrassed. I was certain that he had noticed my slip, even though he hadn’t commented on it. I felt an urge to explain myself, in case he thought that other things I told him were embellished in the same way. But I kept silent, even after M. wrote to propose a day for our walk. After several days of silence, he wrote again, to ask whether I was alright, adding that he missed hearing what treasures I had collected in these past few days to show him.
I wrote back to say that this was in fact the problem. It could be tiring to collect things.
“As if I’m constantly being probed for entertainment,” I wrote. “Like a jukebox.”
(M. loved jukeboxes. He used them often as metaphors.)
I said this because I was ashamed.
M. wrote back that I should never feel obliged to tell him stories.
“Please don’t think you must constantly invent things in order to entertain me,” he said. “And please don’t feel you have to reveal something to me.”
58.
That year in Istanbul, my mother asked me to read to her. This was later, when she no longer got out of bed.
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