Many and Many a Year Ago

by Selcuk Altun

  “I didn’t expect a miracle, but of course I was curious about what she would say, so I went. She’d made reservations for dinner on the terrace and it wasn’t long before she was telling me everything. Her mother had tried to marry her off but she wasn’t having any of it. She met a man called Eli Arditti who whisked her away to Buenos Aires. She was glad to go, thought it would get her out from under her mother’s thumb.

  “First he tried to go into partnership with his cousin in Buenos Aires, and when that didn’t work out, he set up an export business. He lost a fortune. Yet when they returned to İzmir he managed to sweet-talk Esther’s mother into another loan. She sold her apartment building to fund a jewelry business with an Istanbul Armenian. Esther was expecting that to fail too.

  “She felt trapped, she said. She couldn’t divorce him because of her daughter Stella, who was seven at the time and adored her ridiculous father. She couldn’t take the money she inherited from her mother’s rental properties out of the country for regulatory reasons. So she holidayed in Istanbul each year, then bought rugs at the Grand Bazaar with what was left and sent them back to Buenos Aires to sell.

  “She told me all this like it was some kind of joke. It reminded me of her goodbye speech nine years earlier. I couldn’t get a word in edgeways, not even to offer my condolences for her mother who had passed away. I asked the odd questions alright, and nodded when I was supposed to. To be honest, I was surprised that she wasn’t offended by my diffidence. She dragged me up to her room with a view of the Bosphorus to show me Stella’s picture. Reluctantly I took it in my hands. It really irked me to see how handsome her husband was. There was something of Alexander the Great about him. Stella seemed to have inherited her father’s looks. She was as pretty as a china doll. I felt a sudden urge to flee. I reached out to stroke Esther’s cheek goodbye and she grabbed my hand.

  “The next morning we left for Cappadocia. It surprised us to discover that we were as passionate about each other as if we’d been separated for nine days rather than nine years.

  *

  “Every June for thirteen years she came to Istanbul. Every year I waited for her. We went on dream holidays, as carefree as two university students in love. We never brought up our problems—we lived in the moment and never thought about how it might end. By then I was a professor and my sister was nagging me to marry. I somehow found out that Esther had had to sell her last property. She mentioned once that Eli had gone into the used-car business. However naïve her husband might be, I never believed that he completely bought Esther’s story about having to visit Istanbul every year to collect the rent from her apartment.

  “On her last two trips Esther stayed at three-star hotels. She was happy for me to pay for everything. She was having trouble hiding her uneasiness. On that last trip, as though it were something to brood about, she told me that her daughter had become Miss Argentina. That night I had a dream. Her husband was speeding along in his sports car, crashed and died. As soon as the funeral was over Esther and I would get married …

  “She’d never given me her address or telephone number, for fear that I might call her. When she didn’t show up in June of 1987 I was almost in tears. Early in July—which is ‘Tammuz’ in Hebrew and means the month of tragedies—I ran into her childhood friend Luna, whom Esther visited whenever she was in town. She had bad news for me: Esther and Eli had been killed in a car crash.

  “I collapsed on the spot. From that moment on I could be little more than a zombie. Esther was the vital half of my body and soul. The inner paralysis that lay in wait for me was too horrible to contemplate.

  “My sister ignored my depression. As far as she was concerned I had brought dishonor to the family because I had turned forty-five and was still unmarried. I couldn’t bear it. I decided to move out and asked for my share of our inheritance. She swore that our father had left no cash and when I found out for myself that she wasn’t lying I felt sick. I also learned that the law prevented me from forcing the sale of the apartment. I left on bad terms and moved in with a widower colleague of mine who lived in university housing. Your apartment’s former owner, Izak, had been a school friend of Esther’s and mine. When he told me that the flat beneath his old place was up for sale I bought it, heedless of the debt it would saddle me with. I moved here about twenty years ago.

  “The pain of losing Esther eased little by little. I couldn’t mourn for her because she’d locked herself within me. We fell asleep in each other’s arms at night; in the morning she was the first thing I saw in the mirror. It made me feel good when I heard her voice in my ear or noticed her smile across the table at a restaurant. If I heaved a sigh, I murmured her name along with it. If the music was anything other than her favorite Nat King Cole I didn’t listen to it. Whenever I heard the ezan I turned my face toward the city walls and stared. If I went out, my legs would involuntarily take me to our old hangouts. Esther was no longer my illegitimate wife for a month each June, she was my beloved who lived and breathed with me twenty-four hours a day. She might leave the room when I was lecturing or reading the papers or watching TV, but then she would re-enter and passionately embrace the whole of my existence.

  “I’m sure I haven’t expressed myself very well. But to make a long story short, my dear neighbor, my beloved’s death turned the flame of love in my heart into an eternally glowing ember. To honour her memory, I retired and went into seclusion here. Now I teach part-time and translate romantic novels under a pseudonym, though it does worry me that I might discover a deeper passion than my own …”

  *

  The professor’s words had left me moved. Under that mask of melancholy was a philosophical heart, and what he wanted to convey to me was that I shouldn’t dwell on my sufferings but, like Tanya from Lvov, persist in the search for true love, regardless of the outcome. Who was it said, “Ah, how sad they were, the happiest days of my life”? Well anyway, those words were on my mind as I returned to my study and put on Brahms’ Sonata No. 2.

  A book fell from one of the library shelves. It was The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Inside it was an envelope containing six photographs stuck together with Scotch tape. On the front of the first three were question marks; on the other three were “X’s”. The pretty girl smiling at the camera must have been Suat’s girlfriend, the one who died in the fire. On the back of each picture someone had written, pressing hard with a red pencil, a different stanza of Poe’s mysterious poem.

  I felt compelled to read it twice:

  Annabel Lee

  It was many and many a year ago,

  In a kingdom by the sea,

  That a maiden there lived whom you may know

  By the name of Annabel Lee;

  And this maiden she lived with no other thought

  Than to love and be loved by me.

  I was a child and she was a child,

  In this kingdom by the sea,

  But we loved with a love that was more than love—

  I and my Annabel Lee—

  With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven

  Coveted her and me.

  And this was the reason that, long ago,

  In this kingdom by the sea,

  A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling

  My beautiful Annabel Lee;

  So that her highborn kinsmen came

  And bore her away from me

  To shut her up in a sepulcher

  In this kingdom by the sea.

  The angels, not half so happy in heaven,

  Went envying her and me—

  Yes!—that was the reason (as all men know,

  In this kingdom by the sea)

  That the wind came out of the cloud by night,

  Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

  But our love it was stronger by far than the love

  Of those who were older than we—

  Of many far wiser than we—

  And neither the angels in heaven above,

  Nor the d
emons down under the sea,

  Can ever dissever my soul from the soul

  Of the beautiful Annabel Lee:

  For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams

  Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

  And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes

  Of the beautiful Annabel Lee:

  And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side

  Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,

  In the sepulcher there by the sea—

  In her tomb by the sounding sea.

  IV

  Next morning I woke abruptly from a restless sleep. My head felt as if it was encased in a ball of thick fog. I found myself before the stereo with an urgent need to purge my soul of that story of shattered love. I sought solace in Tristan und Isolde …

  *

  The professor and I began meeting every other day. Did this fact escape the sharp eyes of Sami, who surely noticed that I’d been drawn into Ali’s melancholy orbit? Ali’s invitations were actually a source of relief to me. I felt relaxed and reassured in his apartment. He would sometimes criticize my idleness while giving me cooking lessons, but I was honored even by this. And I wasn’t at all curious about whether he knew Suat. And when his eyes became fixed on a faraway point I knew it was time for him to be alone with Esther.

  *

  I’d done my weekly shopping at the Balıkpazarı gourmet grocers like a jolly retiree. My good mood was ruined when I got home to find a gray-suited man with a briefcase at the front door. This small middle-aged man appeared annoyed at being kept waiting. He was obviously foreign. When he told me he was a lawyer from New York, I invited him in. I was excited, thinking he would have news of Suat.

  “I want to tell you why I’m here,” he said, stirring the warm milk he’d requested into his tea. “When the Red Army took over Russia, among the first refugees to seek asylum in the Ottoman Empire were First Lieutenant Vladimir—Vlad—Nadolsky and his brother, Lieutenant Maxim Nadolsky. We have to assume that they had with them a bag full of English pounds and precious jewelry. Their father, after all, was a wealthy count. The brothers’ aim was to settle in America as soon as possible. Maxim never imagined that he would have to go to the States alone when their visas finally came through after two and a half years. But Vlad had taken a job teaching French at a private school and had fallen in love with the married vice-principal. Zoe, as she was called, was unwilling to go with him to New York since it would mean leaving her paralyzed husband behind, so Vlad had to stay too. To be close to her, he rented the apartment that is now yours. Maxim was an ambitious but honest man; he made his brother a fifty percent partner in the import-export business he founded in his adopted country and, when the business flourished, sent Vlad enough money to live on comfortably. During the Second World War Vlad became foster father to an orphan named Haluk Batumlu. He loved him as a son, yet when the boy was expelled from university as a communist sympathizer, Vlad was quick to disown him. Meanwhile he continued to wait for Zoe’s husband to die so that he could marry her. But his beloved preceded him in death. So on his seventy-fifth birthday Vlad flew to New York to be near his brother. Maxim died in 1984 and his son Alex took over the company. Vlad died in his bed in 1999, aged 105. Except for the day on which the collapse of communism was announced, nobody had ever seen him smile.

  “Vlad left his entire inheritance, apart from his $1.3 million savings, to his nephew Alex. Other than an old telegram Vlad carried with him, we had no clue at all as to the whereabouts of Haluk, who had inherited that $1.3 million. I ran ads in two popular Turkish newspapers. We waited six months but heard nothing. At that point Alex founded an investment fund in his uncle Vlad’s name. For the last seven years the profits on the money that never found its way into the luckless Haluk’s hands have been donated to Vlad’s favorite church. Last month, when his uncle showed up in Alex’s dream scolding him for not trying hard enough to find Haluk, I was dispatched immediately to Istanbul.

  “I knew that an ordinary interpreter would get me nowhere. So when one of the locals mentioned a brave English-speaking pilot who’d just moved in, I wanted to meet you. Firstly, Lieutenant Kuray, I have a proposition for you: use this telegram Haluk sent to Vlad fifty years ago to trace him. I’ll give you $10,000 in advance. If you find him or his heirs in ten days I’ll give you $20,000 more. Here’s a card with a phone number. I’m available twenty-four hours a day. If I don’t hear from you in ten days I’ll assume that Alex’s dreams will no longer be disturbed by his uncle …”

  I thought this would be foolish to turn down. I was curious about what the half-century-old telegram said, more than about where it came from. And even if the whole thing ended up being a fruitless Anatolian goose chase, it might at least be a good opportunity for me to adapt to civilian life. The lawyer was already taking a yellowing envelope out of his briefcase. It pleased me to see the anxious look that fell across his face when I ignored his card and failed to open the envelope, but I said “Okay” anyway.

  He whistled as he left the apartment.

  Then I remembered Professor Ali, to whom I had promised some specially wrapped fish and a bottle of hot pepper sauce. I went down to him and told him what I’d just learned. From the way he drew in his lower lip and arched his eyebrows, I gathered that he had no reservations about my trying to track down this Haluk Batumlu.

  I counted the dollars—I don’t know why—that poured out of the A4 envelope, and read the telegram twice through its protective plastic. It was dated 5 June 1956:

  Vlad Baba,

  I have one last favor to ask of you. If you could send 400 liras to me, care of my friend below, you could change my life. The address:

  c/o Hasan Gezgin,

  Ziraat Bank,

  Mahmudiye,

  Eskişehir

  I kiss your hand,

  Haluk Batumlu

  I went to the Internet to find out about this town whose name was probably bigger than itself. I liked what I saw, mainly because it had a population of less than 5,000. The reason why this tiny spot on the map had been named after Mahmut the Second was that the sultan, for some reason, had set up a stud farm there in 1815 to breed Arabian horses.

  I caught the Başkent Express to Eskişehir the next morning. I was agitated throughout that four-hour journey, reliving those days I spent in the hospital after my plane crash. My hand started shaking as we approached Eskişehir station. I hid it behind my back, hoping the anxiety would pass.

  I took a taxi to Mahmudiye. The slant-eyed driver asked me enthusiastically whether I was a horse dealer. I don’t know with what tone of “No” I answered, but he seemed a little peeved.

  “Sorry, sir,” he said. “It’s just that I’ve never seen anyone come to Mahmudiye who’s not a horse dealer or owner.”

  Long before we reached our destination I grew weary of the bleak thirty-mile stretch of road. I disembarked at a gas station, marvelling at this town which appeared to live in the slow lane. The men I saw wandering the half-deserted main street were all moustache-free, well mannered and slant-eyed. I plunged into side streets where buildings with even two floors stood out like high-rise eyesores. I didn’t see a single cigarette butt on the ground; nor could I find a single blind alley with wild dogs and walls disfigured by graffiti. As I roamed about accompanied by a soft breeze, I heard a melody from a distant accordion and stopped to listen.

  I headed back out to the main street where I saw a green hearse looking quite at home among the John Deere tractors and farm machinery. I noticed that the shopkeepers had all gone home for lunch. Looking for a coffeehouse where I could pick up some information, I realized that if Haluk Batumlu had been in secondary school at the end of World War II he would be in his seventies by now—assuming he was still alive. I reckoned that Hasan Gezgin, the man in the letter, would be about the same age. And no doubt every old man in town would have his regular table at the Friendship Tea House that stood before me. I approached a bearded ol
d man dozing in the sun outside the door. I must have greeted him rather abruptly because he leapt up and began quickly straightening his clothes. I introduced myself. He gestured to the chair next to him and ordered me a tea. When he heard that I was looking for Hasan Gezgin he closed his eyes to aid his thinking, then spoke as if he were reciting a quiet prayer.

  “I moved from Mesudiye to Mahmudiye thirty-four years ago, sir, and I’ve never heard of a Hasan Gezgin. But before you ask that bunch of old liars in the teahouse, let’s call someone here with the same surname—Talat Gezgin. He may be a relative …”

  He stood and took a cellphone from his pocket, then went over to a bald man and spoke to him in a foreign language. I expected to be assailed with curious looks from the small knots of students ambling past the teahouse, but I was surprised at their politeness. Watching this quiet parade of children, I felt like I was on the set of a Fellini movie. The man returned looking satisfied with his homework.

  “I spoke with Talat, Lieutenant; Hasan Gezgin is his cousin. He’s had an accident at work and is staying home. The teahouse boy will take you there.”

  Talat Gezgin met me at the door. He had a dramatic patch over his right eye and appeared to be in his sixties. It seemed to me that he wore his beige jockey pants to emphasize his bowed legs. The living room smelled like detergent and was so clean and tidy that I felt bad about keeping my shoes on. His wife offered me tea and pastries. Her face beamed kindly as if she were trying to atone for past misdeeds. I sipped the aromatic tea and thrilled to the horses surrounding us in photographs and mementos. Talat, on disability retirement after thirty years at the Anatolian Agriculture Association’s stables, was in a dejected mood, not merely because of losing his right eye but because of being kicked by a puny colt. The old groom leapt out of his chair when he heard that I was looking for Hasan Gezgin in order to find Batumlu, a man unaware of his inheritance in America.