by Levi, Mario
On my way to another place years later, my path had strayed toward that town . . .My intention was to take some rest and have a glimpse of it as long as I could, and, last but not least, to find, if I could, that pharmacist. It was a small town and the inhabitants were friendly. It did not take me long to track down the pharmacy in question. However, it turned out that the pharmacy had changed hands and was being run by another lady. The new owner was an attractive woman of about fifty. At first, she seemed cagey about what I wanted to learn, but in the end, she told me everything she knew. The lady pharmacist I had been looking for had apparently preferred not to stay any longer in that town, and felt obliged to leave, according to hearsay, to the south where she had opened a new drugstore. She had ended up marrying an old university friend who had been wooing her. She had put a certain order to her life and was back on her feet. The townsmen with whom she had been on intimate terms had heard that she had eventually found what she had been looking for in the south. As a matter of fact, she was from Iskenderun. She was nearer now to the climate of her youth which she had been missing. About the incident in that hotel room when death had overtaken him, she said that the man in question was a refined gentleman, a rich businessman. While narrating this part of the story, she had had to break off every now and then. Could she have been inventing things? I don’t know; but I had the impression that I was acting in a play in which everybody in the town was taking part. It seemed that nothing had changed; everybody looked like they had stayed right where they had been. I think the reality of the situation lay in my being pushed out or through the impression of my being ousted. As I was leaving the pharmacy, the lady shook my hands warmly and said: “It appears that the man was a refined gentleman, a real gentleman. However, he seemed to have had some serious problems.” As I came out I noticed that there were people who wore meaningful smiles on their faces. There was no change of expression . . . I had to leave . . . I had realized that I had reached a dead end . . . I had no other choice but to continue my journey. Another person who continued her journey for the sake of her own story was Elisa, Sedat the Arab’s wife. It had taken her two years to completely recover; she finally married a wealthy widower with two grown-up children; thus, she had had the privilege of enjoying, as best she could, the remaining part of her life living in the summer of the Princes’ Islands, a thing she could never afford during her previous marriage. Years later, I ran into her on the island at an ordinary moment during an ordinary day. She seemed to be enjoying good health. She spoke to me about her husband’s affairs and of their children as though they were her own. She had not mentioned the name of Sedat. His father being an Antiochian Armenian and his mother a Jewess from Gaziantep, Sedat used to boast of his mixed blood. The only certainty for him was the concrete reality of a lived day. Such an attitude was automatically reflected in many aspects of his lifestyle. The witticism he used to tease Uncle Kirkor with was in reality a projection of this attitude toward delusion. Needling him at these incendiary moments, Uncle Kirkor, whose habit it was to swear like a trooper, would simply utter: “Fuck you! Son of a bitch!” In this, there seemed to be concealed a special affection whose origin was not to be so easily detected. Whether it could be shared or not . . . This was an important issue as it was with other people. However, when one takes everything into consideration, as far as one can infer from the accounts of his contemporaries, Uncle Kirkor had shared with Niko things which he could share with no other person. Even during a game of backgammon . . . I know for a fact that there were many things they had jointly discovered and reproduced. Nevertheless, his common experiences with Niko require a totally different dimension that we ought to discover. There is a place to which only the people whom one cherishes belong, to whom one feels attached and with whom one can never break, a place that faithfully follows one everywhere . . .
Niko the Stoker
Olga had said that Uncle Kirkor had put away the backgammon board sometime after Niko’s departure, never to touch it again. This did not appear strange to me; it was an act that befitted him perfectly; after all he ought to react in some way or another. This didn’t happen immediately, however. The meaning of a particularity of a given experience could be perpetuated only in conjunction with the man with whom that experience was shared. A particularity of a given experience could not be re-experienced with another person, once the person, with whom the said experience had been shared, was no more. Nothing could supersede that experience. There was no other way to experience the said particularity having been immortalized for that particular person. Yes, for that particular person . . . not to soil with a new person the days lived jointly with the old. This was directly related at the same time to one’s awareness of oneself, to one’s self-defense—the need to find self-justification and worth. In those days when you have the perception of being sought after you might think about changing your attire once more. You might inquire how many snapshots had remained from those times of which you were proud. Under the circumstances, I believe I can understand better now why Uncle Kirkor had preferred to bury certain memories in his heart. Such tactile feelings must remain bound. Yes, those feelings must not be impaired. The snapshots must remain unaffected. That was the reason why we had made a point not to pass by ‘that street’ after the loss of ‘that woman.’ This was the reason why the finishing touches had to be put on the story of those backgammon games, so that they could be viewed from this particular angle. The witnesses were aware of this. They slammed the round pieces so strongly in the heat of the game that the pieces were frayed. Those passionate moments, the state of euphoria infected the onlookers who forcefully connected with the players’ emotion, sometimes reaching such a height that the general feeling was that a brawl between the fans of both parties seemed imminent. This demonstration pointed the way toward the losing party treating the winning party to revelry in one of the taverns at Balıkpazarı, or, occasionally to a water pipe session at one of the joints under the Bridge. Sometimes a frenzy overwhelmed the bystanders. Among the onlookers there happened to be greenhorns as well. In such competitive games, the onlookers usually watched each other, or, more precisely, watched as if they were the players themselves.
The evenings passed under the Bridge were the evenings during which there usually reigned a general silence, a general reserve; the evenings during which the actors performed, or were caused to perform their parts, most probably, on a totally different stage . . . Would it be possible for someone at home picking up the scent of fried fish to suddenly be carried away to scenes seemingly sunken into oblivion, scenes poorly enacted, and trapped in the past? Perhaps.
However, regardless of what had transpired, Monsieur Jacques, who had visited the same places long after those evenings had passed, managed to reignite memories in my imagination. The memories of the open-air movie theater he had been running somewhere near Kadıköy in a block of flats, a vestige of the accounts of Toros the Cameraman, who often spoke of Sylvano Mangano in her film Bitter Rice, which he had copied and reproduced without having duly obtained a license during those cold winter days, in those good old days, the number of which he ignored, in a mood similar to what those rundown open-air movie theaters might have felt like during their demolition, thinking of the dilapidated state of the home he could not repair because of his destitute condition, immersed in his reflective solitude. These memories are as vivid in my mind as the impressions that a long conversation would create in reproducing the human faces lost in that refuge, the refuge the stage actors found in each other.
Uncle Kirkor and Niko had made a point of smoking a water pipe with double flexible tubes. This had a simple reason apparently. When the ember was low, someone had to manipulate it in order to keep it going. The practiced hand knew how to do this. This gave a special pleasure to the water-pipe smokers. For this reason Niko had taken charge of handling the tongs that would keep the fire blazing. Uncle Kirkor occasionally warned Niko to be vigilant and not let the fire g
o out. To this warning Niko retorted affectionately, saying: “By God, it won’t.” The same remarks were repeated every evening. It’s a fact that certain clichés are de rigueur in rituals. One day Uncle Kirkor made the remark: “The mouthpiece fits your mouth quite well,” in his broken accent. To which, Niko retorted, pointing to an angler: “Oh bother! Kirkor! Look at the fisherman, he thinks he’s skilled merely because he caught a single horse mackerel!” In order to catch the meaning of such altercations one had to be familiar with the jargon used in that world, with such teasing and mutual asylum—the Weltanschauung that reigned there. Afterward they kept quiet for a long time as though they were far away, as though they lived in distant realms . . . Uncle Kirkor used to make occasional remarks to Niko, saying: “Nicky, are you aware that we are drinking like fish? We are petering out.” Upon which Niko stirred the ember to keep it aglow. Toros, under the impressions and observations he had, appeared to have shot the best film of his life, intending to put it on in his private movie theater which he did not want to share with anybody, keeping it solely to himself. Secluded in his corner, befitting the world of the water pipe, without giving thought to the fact that these words, these ‘designs’ would assume completely different meanings once reproduced and shared . . .
Uncle Kirkor’s remark about drinking like fish was undoubtedly referring to the evenings spent in the pub. Those evenings remind me of Niko sticking out like a sore thumb displaying his modest superiority while selecting the appetizers with great alacrity. At such moments, with my head in the clouds, fascinated by the anecdotal legends of Istanbul, I seem to be under the influence of certain ‘cut-and-dried scenes.’ So what? This part of the game, if such a path was chosen, could be the source of acrid joy . . . At such times, in order that I might perpetuate this experience, I thought of their habit of reverting to knocking back a drink at a cheap joint when they were broke, although I was perfectly aware that Niko’s preference was the stand-up bars. As for the conversations going on in that world of exile, closed to some, consciously or unconsciously . . . to imagine those moments is not that difficult if one takes certain liberties with the details. Henceforth, all that remained to be done for me was to compile certain tittle-tattle tales and patch up the story . . . Niko might have spoken about his wife, who had, at the most unexpected moment, abandoned him to go to Athens, and who, in spite of her visits to the aforementioned city felt like an outsider herself and therefore started an affair with a gypsy from Yedikule; about his homosexual son who had been touring the world in the company of an American TV correspondent; about that ‘Casablanca legend’ he could never succeed in smothering; about the possibility of making big money if he risked that journey, by putting into practice certain bright ideas hovering in his mind; and finally about achieving bliss by getting married to ‘that woman’ he believed to be still waiting for him in Thessaloniki.
In the hope that it would slightly dispel his feeling of loneliness, Uncle Kirkor had most probably confessed that he had not repudiated his wife despite her adulteries; he had never thought of divorcing her and never turned his back on her or accused her of cheating. Wrought as he was by the feeling of frustration for having failed to enjoy the paternity of his son, bitterly disappointed in the wake of the accident that had caused him to stray from his professional path of lathe operator by the inadvertency of Kid Arthur—the conductor of the said accident who was fated to die after spending many years in the asylum La Paix in fits of delirium, repeating his name frequently—who Uncle Kirkor felt a deep remorse for having failed to pay a visit to while he was in the throes of death. I know for a fact that every one of these incidents was a little story that might generate a new beginning. I know that these stories were of the sort that many people would have preferred to turn their back on, and might judge them ‘overstuffed.’ But those who had continuously failed to realize their enchantment, during those long, interminable yarns, had many deceptions and frustrations of their own to tell about, and would have liked to recount them, in the faint hope of linking certain nights to certain mornings . . . We can call this nostalgia, lingering in certain people, of inexpressible alienations, as well as the indelible impressions of an exiled individual, who ventured to live in a different Istanbul to the one he remembered, inhaling its odors, voices, features and eventualities night and day . . .