by Levi, Mario
The paths of the participants involved in the incident had subsequently changed course. Master Mıgır, at the cost of ruining his family, had married a woman with whom he had been head over heels in love and who used to sing songs from the movies of old; but, unable to bear the shock of her elopement with an alcoholic, a mechanic who operated the ‘tunnel of horrors’ at the Luna Park, and believing that a businessman’s sense of honor had been at stake from his having been in default, he had eventually put an end to his life. His next-of-kin claimed that his suicide was not related in any way to what had befallen Kirkor. On the other hand, in the face of this backdrop, of which he had been the unintentional author, Kid Arthur’s already sensitive spiritual constitution suffered greatly; he lost his mental balance completely and was confined to an asylum for the rest of his days. Master Barkev refused to employ any apprentice after that and gave up his intention to train a new novice as a substitute for the victim. As for the principal actor in this play, Uncle Kirkor, as far as I could gather from certain stories from our rare tête-à-têtes that provided me with clues about life in general, he had borne the worries caused in him by this lack of confidence all his life in a secret corner of his being, without blaming anyone, believing, however, that some people, certain individuals from his past would be filled with remorse sooner or later; without accusing or identifying anyone in particular, in full consciousness of the fact that certain convictions were upheld and were supported by little lies or illusions . . . in order not to lose his will to struggle against his master’s betrayal, which, in time, I think, was to lend itself to different interpretations. Not for nothing had he said: “provided we remain alive,” one of those days when he seemed to conjure up certain notions or established a link between them and his experiences. Provided we remain alive . . . these words would come back to me years later, reported by certain members of ‘that family.’ This was the story of a harrowing experience that was kept ever fresh in the mind. “Actually, I might have been a good lathe operator even with a single arm. But, I’d no chance,” he told me, during one of our conversations. “It was my fate . . . Here we are at the end of the road, at the end of our life . . . ” It was a moment of pessimism, of resignation to one’s fate, actually inconsistent with someone who had always been hopeful of what the future would bring, of the realization of his most intimate wishes, an anticipation he had never formerly given up. However, regardless of the attitude adopted toward this deception or defeat, when one observes what Uncle Kirkor had gone through in the wake of that incident, one could not help believing, in that different path, so to speak, known to some as fate. For example, could one explain the socialist side of Master Vahan? He used to make furniture for the house of the Venturas at Akmescit, and preferred to make his comments on daily life and political developments in his smattering of French, which he had acquired simply by listening to his mother speak. He could not quit smoking despite his asthmatic condition, and under the pretext that “otherwise they wouldn’t appreciate my work,” he refused to work for the new rich upstarts whose behavior gave him the creeps and about whose lack of culture he was positively convinced. He believed that money could buy everything despite his financial difficulties and the penury he suffered, thereby causing others to suffer alongside him. He learned from Monsieur Jacques, when he had asked him to arrange a job for his son after that unfortunate accident in order to allow him to get some practice in business, a young man who had succeeded in becoming a self-made man, who had taken over the responsibility of the family, in need of a young, industrious, and what is still more important, reliable employee. Did he realise that through this exchange of words, which, at first, seemed to be a casual dialogue, he would eventually open up the lives of two people toward a lasting togetherness? As far as Uncle Kirkor could remember, in his old age, at a time when he looked back to his past not without some prickliness, thinking that it would do him some good and would be an answer to his moroseness, loneliness, and slovenly behavior, when he was about thirty or thirty-three years of age, he had been married off, by the good offices of certain people ever present at such situations, to ‘Ani the Lame,’ who had an original, exotic, and strong sex appeal. I have it from Monsieur Jacques that Ani was at the time in pursuit of a ‘risky objective’ in order not to be obliged to return to her plebeian family from Kayseri residing at Samatya, as a woman abandoned, after having had an illicit relationship, or, according to some, having been a mistress of a married colonel, at the time she had been introduced to Uncle Kirkor. Ani was the daughter of ‘Serkis the Moody,’ a maker and seller of pastırma (dried, smoked beef) in his shop no bigger than a chest, somewhere in the Eminönü Market, which he opened or kept closed according to his mood that day, and who, whenever the occasion presented itself, claimed that superior quality pastırma was made not of entrecôte, as some people, deluded by its appearance, might think, but from fillet of beef. The first speculations relating to his relationship may have been indulged in during the ramblings that had their origin in that shop cubicle. Uncle Kirkor had seen himself as a rescuer of Ani, a knight-errant. Considering the reigning circumstances, Ani herself may have seen him in that garb. However, to the best of my understanding, the said identity of a savior was not of the sort that one would associate in one’s mind as a unilateral act of supererogation without wanting anything in return. She had, thanks to her feminine touch, appeared to have saved Uncle Kirkor from certain things. This is not my observation, but Monsieur Jacques’ . . . Kirkor, at least at the beginning, during the days immediately succeeding his matrimony, paid special attention to his attire . . . Those were the days when he could laugh to his heart’s content . . . Yet, this had been the social disposition of the day . . . For, after a while, the relationship took a different course, one not easily accepted and accounted for. Everybody got the gist of the affair in due time. Despite all efforts to avoid it, the incubus was always there. Ani had considered this matrimony a shield; it was as though she wanted to point out certain inroads into her eccentric and somewhat perverse spiritual constitution. For she had wanted to compensate for the great disappointment she had suffered by sleeping with other men, in spite of her knowledge of the fact that by this act she grieved and wounded her husband who continued to love her and served as her latent conscience. Ani and Uncle Kirkor had looked on their defects, each other’s defects, from very different angles, possibly from solitary ones. The relationship was the sort of alliance that both sides carried on from their respective perspectives, within the confines of their respective tricks, servitudes and lies. The scenes in the stage play had tableaux in fact, tableaux one would better understand as one penetrated them. Ani felt herself nearer to Uncle Kirkor after each escapade and the latter justified them to himself resignedly to a certain extent by the plea of her eventual return to him after her moral turpitudes. After all, the very fact that a woman, who had had in her parlor many suitors, had married him despite his disabled state gradually boosted his self-esteem, making headway toward his serenity. His crippled condition was compensated in Ani with a like defect. Actually, this had played a pivotal role that had, according to outsiders, joined them in holy matrimony. The motive power had been Ani’s full breasts, her beautiful face and penetrating looks, and last but not least, her feminine charm. With her womanhood and femininity she had overcompensated for her so-called defect. One should also take into consideration the milieu she had been living in, where the saying “a lame wench has a beautiful pussy” had a wide acceptance among the public. Uncle Kirkor was well aware of all of this. Their respective conditions were not equal, in other words. This had partly played the role of the prompter. The cost to Uncle Kirkor of his journey toward serenity had been considerable. However, it was a hard fact that those who had achieved success in life and reached privileged positions were people who had paid, had chosen to pay or had been obliged to pay a heavy cost in life.
Details of a long walk that lent meaning to the word fate, much different from the
widely accepted definition . . . Uncle Kirkor certainly had his own interpretation of his shop with every passing day as a home in which the role played by fate should not be overlooked . . . Life was a path that had to be trodden, or an interminable play that one could not share with others: a play like the one featuring Ani and himself, in which everybody had become familiarized with their role, despite their resistance and expectancies, and eventually it obliged them to go along with it and try to convey it through their delusions. To switch the lights in the shop on and off with certain minute rituals imperceptible to an ordinary onlooker, to have Ismail, the drunkard, grease the shutters of the shop at prescribed intervals, which he meticulously lifted and lowered every evening; to gets bits of profits out of other people’s affairs, hiding in his cache cigarettes that he had stolen from packages lying about, offering them to his guests, as a token of his generosity, shifting the places of fabrics saying that “every fabric has its own season and every season its own place” of which the texture, the weave, the quality he readily identified thanks to his expert knowledge acquired throughout his apprenticeship, as though he wanted to convey the message that seasons influenced individuals’ idiosyncrasies. This act was some sort of a ritual for Uncle Kirkor. I now and then saw him sweep the front of his shop, early in the morning. I used to gaze at him with a smile. He understood me. There were other people who could take care of this, of course. He certainly knew it. However, when I caught him in the act, he had ready clichés to utter in a special broken accent to justify his actions. “After all, it’s our means of existence . . . You must take good care of it and not put it out of sight . . . ” I don’t know why, but this sentence assumed quite a different and deep significance on Uncle Kirkor’s tongue. This was one of the interesting things about that little ritual. Occasionally, we spoke in French. In the rudimentary French of Uncle Kirkor—whose vocabulary hardly exceeded fifty or sixty words. Those were the days of our hijinks. In his vocabulary were also obsolete words dating from the time of his visit to his cousin in Marseilles years ago. Among his recollections of those mornings—of those early mornings—were also the impressions left on him by the visions, voices and scents of the past. Those were our concretely lived mornings. What had been left there were the realities of the places that Uncle Kirkor revived in his imagination. They were the war years that the younger generation would never be able to imagine; those were the times when, despite penury, they had never been short of margarine. I remember the day when the new buses had arrived imported from Sweden. Parsek Dikranyan, their neighbor, a devotee of all things American, had, one day, at midnight, in the company of his wife and daughter, left for New York. According to the accounts that reached us, Parsek, after having engaged in many an uphill struggle, had ended up working as a driver, and, having worked in the profession for many years, died looking back at his days in Istanbul with a certain amount of nostalgia, especially missing the odors that permeated the Spice Market. Nevertheless, rumors were spread to the effect that he had not died a natural death, but had been killed by the dagger of an Italian florist, and that his breathtakingly beautiful daughter, Ida, had become a prostitute. This was one of the stories between Uncle Kirkor and I that had left certain fleeting impressions on me. I think he had been instrumental in contributing to the development of my narrative style and my art of listening. These were my favorite stories, the ones dearest to me. He also reminded me of the cryptic messages that were played by foreign broadcasting stations on the shortwave, transmitted by the French Resistance, after the Ankara radio signed off at eleven o’clock. Among the messages he had especially remembered was one transmitted by the French Resistance Organization: Le cochon est constipé. It was a message he had never been able to decipher, a message whose mysterious meaning preoccupied him until the very end; a message that no longer held any significance. He also remembered listening to the speeches of Général Charles de Gaulle. They got a vicarious thrill from the ongoing events. “They will win . . . Europe will be liberated,” his father had said. Their mother was also with them, she had not yet departed. She used to buy the daily Le Journal d’Orient for her husband from the newspaper stand at Tünel. This daily was the last remnant of the dailies published in French in Turkey. It too was coming to an end, almost without anyone noticing. He used to cast a glance at the paper. At times, the friar at the college Saint-Michel was revived in his memory. He also remembered the morning of the horrible devastation caused at Beyoğlu following the September Incidents, when the main streets were littered with the contents of the shops.
Uncle Kirkor was for me a valuable witness and was one of the principal actors in that long story. However, in this story there was another actor that made him a living and unforgettable hero. To understand Uncle Kirkor without having an idea about that actor was impossible. To turn a deaf ear to that actor’s account would be tantamount to listening to Uncle Kirkor with only one ear. It appeared that that actor had encountered Uncle Kirkor for the first time at a very special moment of his solitude that no one had had any inkling of. How otherwise could one play that prank on others?