Many and Many a Year Ago

by Selcuk Altun

  “I knew Nalan would never recover. She took early retirement to raise Sim. The closer she became to her grandchild, the further she pushed me away. Back then I didn’t suppose that she was aware of my little romantic escapades, or that they would make any difference to her if she was.

  “Vlad and I made peace with each other after Yusuf was born. During his sixty-eight years in Turkey he rarely left Istanbul. He said, when he came to Ayvalık for the first time, ‘I’ve been nowhere but Ankara, and I thought I would die without seeing the Aegean.’ He lived to be ninety-five and saw the breakup of the Soviet empire before he died. Since I’d always taken the daily struggle to make ends meet as a desirable thing, I have very little sense of money. It surprised people, naturally, when I refused to get excited about inheriting $1.3 million. When the money went into my account Nalan said, without looking me in the eye, ‘Haluk, why don’t we move to a place where men don’t chase after easy women?’ I was ashamed to the core.

  “My wife loved this olive grove. She brought workmen from Mount Ida and had this abandoned stone house rebuilt almost from scratch. I retired at fifty-five so that we could move here. Nalan was the caretaker of 1,200 trees on two adjacent plots of land. Some of them she gave names to, and she would carry on conversations with them. When Sim went off to high school in İzmir, Nalan took to looking after the trees individually. Me, I never could feel close to any of these thankless plants … each one a unique study in ugliness … posed like a tragic sculpture … calling down incurable diseases … Olives demand constant attention, you know. They bear fruit only every other year, and the profit margins are slim. Under the terms of my wife’s will I can’t sell the olive groves; but I leave the job of tending them to sharecroppers.

  “Sim made her decision to become a painter when she was only ten. Her grandmother always said, ‘That girl was a color fanatic from the day she took her first step.’ She never missed an exhibition. She collected art books. She always had her nose in painters’ biographies. During her childhood we took her to see every major art museum in Europe. It didn’t bother me when her grandmother said, ‘Even this girl’s sweat smells like paint.’ It was as if her passion had developed into a philosophical position. With her professors’ support she decided on an academic career. Then, in the second year of her doctoral studies, she had a traffic accident and completely lost her eyesight. Nalan’s joy of life withered away after that and she stopped taking her medication. The following year she passed away. I buried my angelic wife in the village cemetery up the hill and dug a grave for me beside her. The best compliment I’ve had in the last six months was to be called a dead man walking.

  “Sim’s portrait—the one you see behind me—was painted by a lady named Banu, whom Sim used to visit often in her studio. They say it’s not impossible that my grandchild could see again if she could just find the will to recover. After her grandmother died she gave herself over to music. Whenever she’s not playing the ney, she’s dozing off in the middle of listening to melancholy compositions.

  “I think, now that you’ve heard about the ‘three H’s’, you’ll agree that the saddest story is the leader’s. You must understand that you’ve been the target of an elaborate and expensive practical joke. Vlad always kept the telegram I sent him from Mahmudiye in his diary. I imagine some idiot got his hands on that thick notebook and used a few things he found in it to send you on a fool’s tour of Anatolia.”

  “One minute, sir,” I said. I fished out Stuart Fugato’s card and dialed the “Available 24 Hours A Day” number. A metallic female voice scolded me three times in English: “The number you have dialled is not in service. Please hang up and try again.”

  With the calm of someone who knows he’s right, Haluk said, “Don’t be discouraged, Kemal. There’s a rule at play here: a practical joker lies low for a while, and then will come to the surface if you don’t find him. In fact, tracking me down like you did wasn’t a bad piece of detective work …”

  As I retraced my steps through the olive grove I struggled not with the question “Who?” but “Why?” I walked faster so that the hunchbacked trees couldn’t sneak up behind me shouting, “Idiot! Idiot!” And all the while I couldn’t remove the image of Sim from my mind.

  V

  I slunk back to Istanbul feeling like a marathon winner whose medal has been revoked. I was too tired even to grumble at the burned-out driver of the taxi I grabbed at the bus station. We pulled into the Balat neighborhood with me slumped down on the tattered back seat. It was the first time I’d ever run up my stairs. I didn’t treat myself to a hot shower, I didn’t even feel like listening to Bach. I felt more like an exile than someone coming home. I thought my right hand would distract me by starting to shake, but it didn’t. I took two sleeping pills and went to bed as the late afternoon ezan rose up from the 3,000 mosques.

  It was midnight when I stirred sluggishly and pulled myself out of bed. I ate the last two candy bars in the fridge, then put on and took off my shoes twice, choosing not to go to Disco Eden in the end. Professor Ali must be up translating Madeleine Bourdouxhe’s Marie, I thought. At the risk of being turned away, I knocked on his door, thinking I might feel better if I told him what I’d been through. He finally opened the door and for the first time I saw him unshaven. I suspected he’d been watching a documentary on great white sharks.

  “I’ve been expecting you,” he said.

  I launched into a passionate diatribe, but his interest seemed gradually to fade, to my surprise. He sensed my uncertainty.

  “You accomplished more than I thought you would,” he said. “But not every story you play a part in is going to have a prosaic ending. Don’t you think that as a classical music fan you should react more calmly to surprise developments? Besides, the last act of this drama may be still to come …”

  He looked satisfied to see that I was more confused. Putting a glass of wine in my hand, he said, “I have things to tell you too, Kemal. While you were gone my sister Oya passed away. I thought of you as I was burying her at Z. She left the Maçka apartment and enough money to rescue me from teaching snobbish rich kids. When the university closes in two weeks for summer vacation I’ll be on my way to the States. And you’re coming with me! We’ll be hitting the New York-San Francisco-Santa Fe-Juneau circuit.”

  Stunned, I was still shaping a refusal when he went on.

  “I know you don’t exactly deserve a prize. But it would be painful for me to be alone on a trip like this, so you’ll be my traveling companion.”

  Two days later I saw him as he was leaving the building. His face was such a mask I didn’t approach him. I decided to wait for him to call after he got over whatever it was was troubling him. I attended the Istanbul Classical Music Festival, hopping from venue to venue with my eighty-year-old friends. On the day I renewed my passport he invited me to dinner. He looked considerably more relaxed. Luckily I didn’t ask him why we were having Argentinean wine with our rocket salad, artichokes in olive oil, risotto with mushrooms, and profiterole with ice cream. When he rose and turned down Nat King Cole, I expected an announcement. He came back with an envelope. The piece of paper that fell out of it read:

  TO FIND ESTHER:

  CALLE 3 DE FEBRERO, NO. 2035-B

  BELGRANO

  “For four days I’ve been grappling with the riddle that came out of this envelope,” he said. “It was mailed from Taksim with no return address. Once I found out from the Internet that Manuel Belgrano was an eighteenth-century Argentinean national hero, I bought a guide to Buenos Aires. There I discovered that Belgrano is also a neighborhood favored by wealthy Jews. Esther always kept her address and phone number to herself. But the address on this piece of paper might refer only to her first address there. I can’t check with our friend Luna because after her husband died she moved to Israel and lost touch with everybody. I commissioned one of my former students from İzmir to do a little investigation, but he came up empty-handed as well. The Ardittis and Venturas apparently
either died off or have been scattered throughout the world. But one of Eli’s close friends, a bridge teacher, said that she’d heard nothing about Esther dying in the accident.

  “This could be a trick somebody’s playing on your eccentric neighbor, but I’ll never rest if I don’t go to Belgrano, Kemal. I’m ready to run the risk of playing the goat in somebody’s expensive joke, if that’s what it is.

  “I can’t help feeling that your Anatolian wild goose chase was preparing you for this Argentinean chapter. We’ll have to modify our travel plans a bit. Let’s first fly to Buenos Aires for a five-day reconnaissance. We don’t need visas. Winter is about to start there, but they say the temperature never falls below fifteen degrees. You’d better pack your fall clothes …”

  *

  The next evening we were on a flight headed to London and then Buenos Aires. As I buckled my seat belt I felt like the reluctant driver of a garishly decorated horse cart. Professor Ali, who was afraid of flying, closed his eyes. To my left sat a green-eyed young man. He was trying to get his hands on the single-malt whisky reserved for first class passengers by touching the stewardess’s arm and whispering in her ear.

  That first flight from Istanbul to London that I’d taken fifteen years ago to study English was what, to a certain extent, had awakened my passion for flying. But now, as this BA 677 set down at Heathrow, it was a deserted café in Beyoğlu named Londracula that was on my mind. Slogging from Terminal One to Terminal Four gave me the feeling of having landed in two foreign countries simultaneously. We grabbed something to eat then stopped in at an adjacent bookstore. While Professor Ali was browsing through the magazines I found a copy of Love in the Time of Cholera on the shelf and read the blurb: Fifty-one years, nine months and four days have passed since Fermina Daza rebuffed hopeless romantic Florentino Ariza’s impassioned advances and married Dr. Juvenal Urbino instead … As we boarded the clunky aircraft that would take us to Buenos Aires via São Paolo, I asked Professor Ali if he thought it was the greatest romantic novel of all.

  “It’s not how many years you’ve had to wait for your darling, but what you’ve had to endure while you were waiting,” he said.

  We hopped like a kangaroo on the deserted São Paulo runway shining in the early morning light. The numbed São Paulo passengers filed out of the plane, and the uniformed mulattos of the janitorial crew filed in. Bored, I regarded the shy women at their chores. Without taking their eyes off the floor they were somehow managing to check out the male passengers. It was only two more hours to our final destination. I began to calculate in how many minutes—ten, maybe—I could cover the distance in an F-16, but it was depressing. I resolved not to say a word beyond “Good morning” to my next neighbor.

  The stewardess was announcing take-off when an attractive young woman came toward me with confident steps. I concentrated on her snow-white trousers as though I’d been assigned to find a spot on them. I was devastated when she sank into the seat beside me without so much as a “Good morning.” Even I couldn’t miss the pleasing symmetry of her turned-up nose, wide brow, and ponytail. It didn’t surprise me when she immediately produced a book from her purse to hide behind. I inhaled her intense perfume and bent closer to the “Buenos Aires Statistics” section of my guidebook.

  I skimmed through her book while she was in the restroom. For me to weary of a novel, it’s enough to glance at the plot summary. I was a bit alarmed, however, by the synopsis of The Tango Singer by Tomás E. Martinez: Bruno Cadogan has flown from New York to Buenos Aires in search of the elusive and legendary Julio Martel, a tango singer whose voice has never been recorded yet is said to be so beautiful it is almost supernatural was too close to the probable parameters of our own mission. The title page bore a dedication: “To Sheila-Lucy, fugitive from Gemini.” The fountain pen that wrote one word in green and the next in black apparently belonged to one E.S. As Sheila-Lucy came crisply back to her seat, it struck me that she knew very well how her sulky countenance contributed to her mystery. She disappeared again into her book and I feared she would realize, with the intuition of her astrological sign, that I had riffled through it. Every now and again she would raise her head and narrow her eyes to focus on some unknown point, and it looked as if she were posing patiently for a portrait painter.

  Whose profile did Sheila-Lucy’s remind me of? This idle question quickly grew into an obsession that made me forget my apprehension.

  *

  Our stewardess gave us two forms to be filled out and turned in to passport control.

  “It’s like entering the U.S.A.,” Professor Ali said.

  Had I not been so engrossed in this Sheila-Lucy woman, I might have been more acutely aware of his rising anxiety.

  “If a terrorist suddenly changed this plane’s destination to Istanbul, I wouldn’t mind at all,” he confessed as I was filling out his form.

  On the descent to Ezeiza Airport I had the crazy idea that the sky would fill suddenly with bandoneon tunes and our clunky vehicle, trying to cut a couple of simple tango figures, would miss the landing strip.

  At last, Buenos Aires.

  Professor Ali didn’t approve of the party atmosphere in Arrivals. I appreciated that he at least managed not to scold the assistant at the exchange bureau who insisted on seeing his passport. To get a taxi we first had to queue up in front of a cash payment booth, then, with receipt in hand, join another queue.

  “Kemal, have we been thrown into an Iron Curtain country of twenty years ago?” the professor grumbled.

  The undernourished porter said to follow him and picked up the lightest suitcase, thus letting us know what kind of tips he expected. Ali, to my surprise, didn’t say something like, “After all that, we damned well better get a limousine.” We crammed ourselves into a Renault-9 and I felt as nervous as if we were passing into Turkey through an eastern border gate. But as we neared what looked like the city center, I began to appreciate it in the manner of somebody leaping from Anatolia to Istanbul. The wide streets of Buenos Aires, a city established on flat ground thirteen centuries later than Constantinople, looked like a scrap yard for old cars.

  I amused myself by saying, “Has every thirty-year-old Peugeot 504 on earth decided to retire to this backwater?”

  I was thinking that Argentina and Turkey were like two cousins who couldn’t shake off their chronic illnesses long enough to get together, when the taxi driver broke into an old folk song.

  *

  The huge Buenos Aires Sheraton put me in mind of the elegant “Mediterranean Statue” stuck in a hidden corner of Istanbul. I handed my bag to the bellboy but Professor Ali, following me, insisted on carrying his own heavy suitcase, stumbling and falling flat on his face. He limped to reception on his own, refusing to take my arm, but ten minutes after we’d retired to our rooms he knocked on the door. I opened it to find him sinking to the floor, groaning in pain. The ankle was swollen; he couldn’t stand on it. We had to put him on a stretcher for the trip by ambulance to Arrivadavia Hospital. The receptionist Ricardo accompanied us, trying to make up for his lack of English by grinning perpetually.

  After the ordeal of registration we were ushered into the presence of a dark-haired doctor whose nametag read “Armando Kaltakian.”

  He saw me smiling as I read it and said, in perfect Turkish, “If you’re smiling at my surname rather than my face, you’re amused by your own limited vocabulary.” I was taken aback. “Maybe it’s true that the word kaltak has been abused as ‘whore’ in street slang, but what it really means is the wooden part of a saddle. My forefathers were the most respectable saddle-makers in Malatya. They were the major suppliers for Ottoman sultans and pashas.”

  It was like reliving the embarrassment of the time I got caught cheating on an exam. Kaltakian saw my face fall and leaned over to whisper, “Come on, let’s get this old coot back on his feet.” As he listened to Ali he patted his head and took his pulse like a virtuoso tuning his instrument. Tenderly he probed his right ankle. Watching the physi
cian nimbly apply his cure I could easily visualize his ancestors in Malatya working on those saddles. Giving the professor some rehydration pills and painkillers, he said, “Keep your ankle bandaged for five days, Professor. Except for bathroom calls, don’t let that foot touch the floor. Rest as much as you can. On the fourth day the swelling should go down and you can try walking, though without putting too much pressure on your ankle. Geçmiş olsun as we say in Turkish. Get well soon.”

  I knew that Professor Ali, now that his pain was lessening, wouldn’t let this mysterious doctor off so easily. The self-proclaimed Armando was backed into a corner by his patient’s questions.

  “My real name is Armenak,” he admitted, “and I’m from Pangaltı—thank God—in Istanbul. My father, believing that ‘Turkey was finished’ after the 1980 coup, sent me to Argentina—the land of military coups. The financial situation here is no better than in Turkey. I work extra jobs so that I can see the city I was born in every two years.”

  Armenak of Pangaltı seated his whining patient in a wheelchair and pushed him to the ambulance. He never asked what we were doing in Buenos Aires. He handed me his card and kissed the professor’s hand farewell. Ricardo, who now thought we were friends, grew frustrated with me on the way back to the hotel when I didn’t know the Argentinean player on Istanbul’s Fenerbahçe football team. In an attempt to distract him I asked the number of rooms in the hotel.