Many and Many a Year Ago

by Selcuk Altun

  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.

  VII

  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.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I found him, but I can’t settle accounts with him because he’s hiding somewhere beyond my reach.”

  “Does this pervert have a lot of money?”

  “He’s plenty rich and plenty smart too,” I replied, trying to indicate with a look that his choice of words was perhaps a little extreme.

  “You don’t seem to want to talk a lot about it,” he said. “Well, bring your glass here and let’s drink to other things …”

  The porch at the top of the tree-covered hill had the ambience of a retired sultan’s royal caique. The view of the misty Aegean from this shady eyrie transported me. The soft wind fell back into the sea after sighing up the hill to kiss my face, and fresh fragrances filled the air as the sun sank, producing a peaceful feeling that the buzzing of the locusts only increased: the joy of it all made me feel that my chair might become slowly airborne, until Haluk said, “There’s so much oxygen on this hillside that a man can’t quench his thirst.” When our conversation turned to the confessional, he spoke first, as I expected he would, of his deceased wife.

  “Women go through a more basic change in the ageing process than men,” he said, opening the second bottle. “I wore myself out trying to deal with Nalan, who was a very fragile woman … But ever since we challenged the world hand-in-hand when we were twenty-one we overcame every crisis together … The moment my wife died I turned into a zombie, Kemal. I woke up every day only to feel the pain worsen. If my hand went out to a raki glass, I remembered the first day our eyes met. Following my doctor’s advice I cut my drinking to every other day, and I spend at least two hours at Nalan’s grave on my sober days. When Sim heard that I’d fallen asleep in the plot I reserved for myself next to Nalan’s, she said, ‘Are you rehearsing?’

  “No, Kemal, even in the soap operas you won’t see such things as have befallen my granddaughter, who is my reason for enduring all this!

  “… Sim fell in love with a kid younger than herself, a student in the School of Architecture at the same university. The Rasputinesque Rebii Güler was ‘by birth a potential world-class architect and painter.’ But what Nalan said about this insipid hanger-on of Sim’s was, ‘There’s no spark of love in that boy’s eyes.’

  “Two years ago Rebii was drunk and driving his Jeep when he crashed into a minibus on the Bosphorus road. Sim was in the front seat. Her seat belt came undone and she flew through the windshield. At the hospital, where we could hardly bear to look at her lacerated face, we learned that she had lost her sight. The accident report declared that the boy had not been under the influence of alcohol and that Sim’s seat belt had not been well fastened. It did no good, of course, when my granddaughter regained consciousness, to learn that it was a fraudulent report. Rebii’s father was a wealthy dentist with powerful connections. This unscrupulous man immediately packed his son off to Paris and discharged his obligations to us with a reluctantly apologetic phone call.

  “Day and night for six months we took turns being tormented in hospitals reeking of death in Istanbul and London … We suffered a severe meltdown both emotionally and financially. The stress of this period muted our jubilation over the success of the reconstructive surgery. Sim’s face was recovering even as she mourned Rebii’s disappearance. It was her ophthalmologist who broke the news that with a cornea transplant my granddaughter would be able to see again. I knocked literally on every possible door until I found a suitable pair of corneas … The surgery too was a success. The next day, when she opened her eyes, Sim announced timidly that she could see, but only in gray tones. We returned home when she reached the point of ‘seeing the world like a Nazmi Ziya painting behind tulle.’ We sacrificed a lamb in thanksgiving. But that was it; our happiness could go no further. Within a month the poor girl’s eyes had closed again. According to the officious professor who performed the surgery, her body had rejected the corneas. He told us we could apply to an American clinic specializing in this type of case—if we happened to have a few hundred thousand dollars to spare. I could have spat in his face.

  “Sim was in fact getting stronger, but when she lost her grandmother she fell apart again. The psychiatrist indicated that she could recover from her depression in two years or so with medicine and moral support. It’s been more than a year now since my wife died. And if you ask me she’s no better.

  “If we’d simply told her that the new resident of Vlad Baba’s house had brought her a CD from Buenos Aires she wouldn’t have bothered to come out of her room. But when she heard about your accident—which tore you away from the military but not from life … You’ll be meeting Sim when you have your coffee.”

  We passed into the empty living room of the stone house, which was as luminous as a ghost in the descending darkness. It was good that he kept his eye on me as he brought Sim into the room and took our orders for coffee. Her smoke-colored glasses could not conceal her attractive face. Her hair was tied in a pony-tail, making her broad forehead more prominent. (Hayri Abi used to say that women with large foreheads were both intelligent and obstinate.) She could be considered tall. She wore a pale pink T-shirt and gray trousers. As she approached me I was startled by Haluk’s signal to rise and shake her hand. She said, in a lucid and sad voice, as she seated herself next to her grandfather, “I heard that you survived a terrible accident. I hope you’re all right now.”

  Empowered by the fact that she was four years younger, I said, “We should both be grateful that we’re still alive. But you seem luckier than I, since you’ll be able to start seeing and painting after your operation. Me, on the other hand, they wouldn’t even give a helicopter for safekeeping.” This made her grandfather nod his head in earnest. My tongue was loosened. I thought the story of Professor Ali and Esther would entertain them both, so I held nothing back except for the clue laid down by Suat. When Sim scolded her grandfather for dozing off, I felt as relieved as a nanny who’s just passed a test posed by a difficult child she’s about to start minding.

  I received an invitation to breakfast the next morning, which I couldn’t refuse, although Haluk’s request that I punctuate it with a musical presentation of the CDs I’d brought along seemed a bit much. Zakir’s son drove me back to the hotel in Sim’s purple Jeep. Samsun was the name of this fellow, who was earnestly trying to be macho by complaining about how easy his military service on the Bulgarian border had been. It was probably the umpteenth time he’d explained how he got his name: his father had named him after his prison cellmate’s hometown. He added that his sister’s name, Renk—“color”—was “a gift from Miss Sim.” It was clear that he would be gratified by a question like, “How long have you been working for Haluk Bey?”

  “When my father got out of prison he came to Ayvalık for seasonal work. The year I was about to start grade school, he called me and my mother to C. because he was going to work for Haluk Bey. That was fifteen years ago. Hereabouts they always called me Kurdish Samsun, Captain. Our boss always paid for my education, so when he almost went broke I quit school. He’s our provider and we’ve become a natural part of the olive grove now. We’re all upset about what happened to Mrs. Nalan and Miss Sim, Captain. Each one of us came and bowed to our patron and said that we were ready to g
ive an eye for our miss any time he wanted. The boss thanked us and said if this was possible he would have given both of his own eyes. I swear by the holy book that it wasn’t a joke when I asked him to let me go and cut the eyes out of that shameless boy and his worthless dishonorable father, Captain. Mr. Haluk said that people without honor will get their reward in the other world if not this one. Right now the main thing is for Sim to get well enough to be operated on again. Once there was a deserter from the army, a private I knew, his name was Dervish, and he said that the angels and devils are inside us and not outside and that hell and heaven are on earth and all this stuff has got me mixed up real bad …”

  “Samsun, please stop calling me ‘Captain’,” I said, trying to calm this potential self-sacrificer. “If your deserter had been an F-16 pilot he would have known that heaven is not on earth. And Mr. Haluk is not worried about Sim; by next year at the latest he will send her to a specialist clinic in America for an operation.”

  “My mother heard our boss talking to his granddaughter and saying that he might have to sell both olive groves to raise the money for the operation. Miss Sim yelled, ‘I won’t let those groves be sold for a risky operation.’ Since I heard this I buy a lottery ticket three times a month and play lotto once a week.”

  I said hello to the night shift in the lobby and went up to my room to gaze at the lights on the point. The satisfying duet between darkness and silence brought me to my senses. A trickle of olive-oil aroma entered the midnight mosaic, somehow reminding me of the Rameau concert I’d missed on the radio. I think Suat had had two expectations when he bequeathed me an apartment and a salary: the first was that I would help Ali and Esther get together; as for the second, I didn’t know how I was supposed to help a blind girl. As I undressed for bed I should have been considering my limitations. Instead, what was on my mind was the line, “Alone under a shooting star, a girl undressing.” I was sifting my memory for its author when I dozed off …