Istanbul Was a Fairy Tale

by Levi, Mario

  Madame Roza’s invitations had been in Spanish; she could have done it in French as well. But the fact that she had preferred to address people in Spanish rather than French, which the present audience had but a broken knowledge of, was because she thought that speaking in the vernacular would make her less presumptuous and self-effacing. This behavior would enhance her respectability. Spanish, she thought, would be the right medium that would warm the atmosphere. Moreover, she could not tell for sure whether all the guests spoke French. Cordiality and fellow feeling had to be promoted, especially between certain individuals. All these things, generated by other experiences and other cordial ties, had happened in the wink of an eye and had not been premeditated. That moment was like a silent uncertain touch to a chance spot.

  But for that touch she might have had reason to keep certain reminiscences she believed to have left locked up safe and sound. Madame Roza’s particular attention to this fact did not surprise me. I knew that she possessed a wealth of experience which few people could match. This characteristic of hers would one day give birth to a few particularities she would never be able to forget. Partly because of these lost traces, I had tried to discover the true hidden or disguised character of the story. Madame Roza was a woman of certain particulars which might be generally ignored. She was marked by a meticulous, sensitive, and demanding nature, intent upon niceties which one could ignore, but which, in the long run, might covertly alter the course of our lives, without making a show of her diligence. The invitation to the table that day addressed to the families should also be considered from this point of view. The words spoken had been translated into French for those whose origins had not been in Spain, namely for the Ashkenazim who lived in the Rhineland valley and in neighboring France before their migration eastward to Slavic lands. Old hatreds, resentments, and envious rivalries were henceforth consigned to oblivion, quarreling factions were reconciled . . . As time went by everybody learned to accept each other without question or objection, notwithstanding some bickering and altercations between certain people.

  Another characteristic of this banquet was the encounter of Juliet’s four paternal uncles and two maternal aunts at the same table. Such an encounter had never taken place, before or since. It is to be noted, however, that there had been family members who had not shown up for various reasons. Ginette was one; she was in Israel leading a totally different life. There was another woman whose absence had been deeply felt, at least by a particular person: it was Olga. Olga’s fate had obliged her to experience her loneliness and abandonment once more that morning. In particular, Monsieur Jacques must not have been able to rid himself of that feeling that was prompted by the steps he had failed to take that day. That failure had made itself felt despite all efforts. There was another person suffering from the same fate. Madame Roza was not a mere spectator at the place she had chosen or was obliged to be. This fact was known to everybody acquainted with the true story, everybody who had been able to understand it. Everybody had done their duty up to a certain point, everybody . . . Perhaps that was the reason why Monsieur Jacques had tried so often to dodge those various people within him. It so happened that those voices called him to secret mysterious lives at the least expected moment.

  Assorted people, esoteric lives; voices which make you believe that you can wake up as a person with different values, opinions, backgrounds, and odors in defiance of all your fantasies, transformed into songs, imbued with the garb of slavery. Words . . . letters . . . words . . . letters . . . sentences left incomplete, sentences mixed together, sentences that always lead up to the same solitude, sentences that compel you to regress to a former state and build up your defenses. Was your decision in taking those people, your people, as your own, and conveying them to others in your own words, your own words exclusively, related in any way to your evasion? Had it not been you yourself, the person within you, who had been eager to tell of it? To tell it, to hold on to somewhere, to belong somewhere . . . who was that person to whom you were so desirous to communicate it but had failed? Who was that person to whom you failed to communicate it, the person whom you tried to protect by putting off your story? Such questions and the impressions that they bring with them seem to me to be more necessary than in a great many stories narrated to me by others relating to that morning. That morning there was another person whose absence was deeply felt. It was Jerry, whose absence caused his family to yearn for him even more poignantly, the youngest brother who was to opt for a quite different isolation and who was to be transformed into a hero of fiction, a figure in those photographs I secretly kept before me, a fiction whose identity came more and more to the fore. Calls were made to Jerry that evening by the people close to him which had differing vibes and questions. Everybody had become proportionally situated with his or her closeness to him. Desire was something different. There were times when desire meant injustice, there were other times when it meant regret, and other times unbearable despair. To be content with what one was allowed to say about the story that would likely be accepted by the audience was much easier; to wit what Madame Roza had revealed, or had preferred to reveal and what the listeners were disposed to accept. The main character of that fiction had been settled in his proper place that morning by the people present there. This was a place where truth and lies could not properly be defined. He was preparing for the difficult graduation exams at Harvard where he had been studying economics. He was a brilliant student; a promising future awaited him. However, just as is the case with all similar prospects, a price had to be paid for real success in life. They had to understand this; as a family they did have experience in this respect. They had learned how to look ahead with hope and fortitude. To be able to appreciate the dawning of the day one had to experience the preceding darkness of the night. Jerry had indeed desired to attend his elder brother’s wedding ceremony, but he thought his traveling such a long distance for such a brief sojourn might impair his studies. This had saddened the family who nevertheless understood his excuse. It would have been a blessing to see him there. Leaving all these things aside, there was no doubt that time was changing. One should understand the ways of young people . . . whether we liked it or not their lifestyle would necessarily be different from ours. Madame Roza had acted with subtleness and wisely intervened. Furthermore, the good old boy of Harvard had quite unexpectedly become the hero of the table. One of the Polish bridesmaids had shared her impressions in French, rolling the r’s in her own fashion. One of the maternal uncles had looked at her with a condescending smile. According to him, she stuck out like a sore thumb despite the gestures of goodwill being expressed by all. One could not deny that certain feelings were being betrayed by certain looks despite all efforts to conceal them. It might well be that that man had returned to his old ways. The marriage that his brother had contracted with such a woman, with a stranger, had given rise to a lasting habitual error. Nevertheless, one could not possibly deny that the Polish bride was beautiful and attractive. Yes, a beautiful and attractive woman she certainly was! It had been this natural virtue of hers that had caused all the trouble. His eyes had been fixed on her protruding breasts that her low cut dress made still more prominent. Under the circumstances, where exactly did the problem lie? Where did those feelings come from, those drives that never before found means of expression? Juliet was to tell me an anecdote one day about her uncle. We had read the story of a man who had been forced into marriage at a least expected moment with someone he had never anticipated. Despite the short lapse of time, the man, fretting the long years of marital life ahead, had to admit that he could not get accustomed to this marriage of convenience. To what extent and purpose would being a mere spectator to other people’s loves make any difference? The story seemed to induce the listener to seek answers to this question. “So what had been Uncle Victor’s fate,” said Juliet after a long silence. “He never loved the woman he was forced to marry; nobody ever had an inkling of his gentle soul. He used to rec
ite a good many poems by Victor Hugo. He spent his last years in utter loneliness. He had experienced an aching black void upon the death of his wife. This experience was due, in my mind, to an incident that he recollected of his younger days. He distinctly remembered it. There was a young Austrian girl who had taught him games in a language he could not understand at the house where they spent the summer. At the eleventh hour, the memory of those times was reawakened vividly. The girl had suddenly left for Madrid. Her father was employed at the consulate. After that fatal day they never saw each other again. Nonetheless, for several years thereafter Uncle Victor had continued to repair to that residence on Heybeliada every summer . . . ” Could it be that the man whose eyes had remained riveted on the bride was that same uncle? It is up to us to establish the connection between the two incidents. We should be mindful of the fact that stories lie hidden in different places for different people until their time to be told is due, they revive hope in us, even a faint one, in addition to a wry joy. Hope gains meaning through stories, even though they might lack originality; stories believed to be different all the same. This conviction, the appearance of this belief, is strong enough to foster in me a line of thought which presumes that during that day spent at that table there had been more than one story being held with bated breath. Another maternal uncle, who stood out among the guests as being dressed up to the nines, the one who enjoyed the repute of being a banker, had remarked—as though he intended to share a secret with the husband of Madame Roza’s cousin who had made a name for himself as a stamp collector whose collection had earned the admiration of connoisseurs and who was always busy in his shop where he sold electrical goods—that he had greatly appreciated Monsieur Jacques for the lavish generosity he displayed for his sons’ education. Behind this laudatory remark lay, I dare say, the anticipation of a disclosure about the actual amount of money spent to this end. However, this was not the right person to ask such a question. Yet, it must be deemed worthy of our attention that despite all our flaws we cannot break ourselves of our age-old habit of poking our nose into other people’s private business. This may partly be due to our efforts to get rid of the hell we cannot expose to others ourselves. If it were otherwise, how could we ever put up with the burden of having skeletons in our closet and endure the sense of loneliness that this brought about? Madame Roza’s words about Jerry had affected Monsieur Jacques and Berti, in particular. Different impressions had generated different meanings, different yearnings and different regrets. A wry smile had appeared on their faces; a smile whose true meaning indicated a concealed sorrow and confusion. Juliet, who had recounted to me the wedding ceremony in the synagogue, Berti’s awkwardness during the ceremony, his clumsiness, the details of the dinner party as though she tried to represent them on a stage, knew all too well what those smiles concealed. These were the very first moments when she felt she was in touch with that family, with her new family. They had met halfway on the road to an agony difficult to disclose and divulge. They had become confidants; they shared a secret that would be kept undisclosed for years. This compelled all parties to remain bound to each other. Nobody could unfold the secrets of his soul to another human being. Was this disassociation a fragmentation in other people in whom one found a shared fate, a continuous recomposition of the same song?

  To find one’s reflected image in one’s solitude

  I had already tried somewhere else to describe the indignation of those whose paths converged and who had to choke back the words they felt in the process of regurgitating. In actual fact everybody was imprisoned in their own sentences, engaged in introspection. However, the said sentences had paved the way to others; we had presumed that we could bring other people to life in those sentences through a process of resuscitation. I think I understand better now the reason why I keep on going back to certain facts which seem to form a sort of unbreakable bond. The same feelings, or at least the associations these might produce, had their origins in other people and places. If one bore in mind the effects created over time by the combined words of Madame Roza, Juliet, Berti, and Monsieur Jacques about Jerry, the said origins shared a common sore spot that seemed to be very far from the actual location of where the words were uttered. Now I feel myself very close to it. A man who learned how to penetrate the darkness of other people gained a vantage point from which he had a better view of himself. On that account, Berti’s experiences that day, that morning, are highly relevant to me. He had—even on that day which was one of his most memorable—experienced a place toward which Jerry’s extremely original associations had directed him in a completely different fashion. That place was to form an important turning point at the time, clad in a garb that should be considered the most significant of his life. When he tried to narrate it, long after Juliet’s account of the story, he gave me quite a different picture than the one Juliet had provided me with. He painted a completely different picture in order to justify himself. He appeared to be somewhat dejected, although he tried to conceal it as best as he could. He was resolved to convince himself that he had acquired the mental and emotional qualities considered normal for an adult and a well adjusted human being, although his shortcomings oozed out at times, despite the fact that all he wanted to do was to communicate and show himself so that he might attract attention and admiration.

  I was well acquainted with that desire. I had tried to preserve some of my stories and keep them to myself for the sake of that yearning; or maybe I had simply played someone false. He had felt himself to be the odd-man-out during that banquet honoring his marriage. Had he been the decision maker he would have preferred a limited number of guests around a modestly laid table; a table in a secluded corner of the city, distant from strangers who took such a vitriolic joy in exposing their pretensions and their hypocrisy. He would have preferred to arrange a clandestine marriage with Juliet and merely show the parents the photographs of the wedding, risking all the resulting consequences that would be in store for them. However, he had submitted to the will of others on the way that led to the nuptial chamber. It was plain, however, that interpreting this as a form of emotional indulgence would be unfair if one considered the preceding incidents. One should not forget that he had submitted to this ordeal to avoid an additional injury to the one Jerry had already caused his parents. They could hardly endure the effects of a new grief. His duty toward the family, a duty he considered preordained, could not allow him to think otherwise. He imagined himself the hero of a play whose fate it was to face his ordeal defying all the adversities this involved. I was familiar with this play. To this play Juliet’s contribution had not been negligible as far as I could see; this play in which we had taken part in different ways, with different sentimental approaches. The shelter was one whose surrounding walls had been raised by others in perseverance, envisaging varying objectives. Juliet knew of these walls. She had observed at the time, through her well-developed intuitive power, the existence of these walls and Berti’s need for them. This modest discovery of hers would secure her a steady progress toward his new family through cautious steps. It had been Berti’s perennial aspiration to find a woman who would guide and advise him in his actions and prospective undertakings. She had understood it in the course of their initial relations when they had first truly touched one another. It looked as though she was going to take over a duty, a transfer of duty that the other female members of his family, of his extended family had cultivated the habit of, a duty undertaken after much consideration. She was going to take over this duty from Madame Roza. This experience had enabled her to realize the boundaries of his zone of security better. This was one of the ways to find peace: to lose one’s serenity in places where rules hardly underwent changes. Juliet had never said a word about this; she didn’t even try to share with me (even when we had been very close to each other) her impression of those days. I come to this conclusion based on the development within me and of Berti’s legacy. Therefore, it is quite likely that I have been led astray
as well. Hadn’t we already observed that what we have consigned to oblivion guided us imperceptibly and would never cease to do so even at times when we have profound belief in our own truths, when we need to lend credence to them? This was a kind of awareness, after all. An awareness that would remind one once more of the fact that truths and wrongs are steeped in our shadows at times. This awareness had caused me to experience that old play once more. Juliet knew these scenes all too well, the very words to be recited, and the figure she would cut in the spotlight that shone upon her face. She appeared on the stage in the part that her history had cast her in. The role she played was the most truthful and convincing role of her life, defying her eccentricity and nonconformity. The play was the embodiment of a sorrow of resignation dated from the days of yore. Women who shared a similar fate to hers felt the drive to expose this anguish. This sorrow had been sublimated and transformed into poetry. Deaths, those silent deaths, could be consigned to oblivion through other people’s mortalities. Juliet would not miss this opportunity. But first, other evenings and other expectations had to be lived. Feelings found their proper places only after divesting a man gradually of his assets. As far as I was aware this was the true state of affairs, and so, I tried to preserve it. I could not possibly ignore that evening I had been trying to prepare myself for Berti’s story, armed with patience, despite my alienated state and my own misconceptions. My admission this time had been from a different angle. I was being guided by Berti. The former visions would gain further meanings with new revelations. They had popped in for a drink at the nightclub Kervansaray on one of the days preceding the celebration of their engagement. There he had spoken about Marcellina and spoken of the particulars of their relationship to the best of his memory. This indiscretion was aimed at gaining a solid footing for the prospective lifelong union. The goodwill of this intention could not possibly be ignored. If Berti’s account of that evening is to be trusted, Juliet had listened to the yarn spun with a smiling countenance, in a graceful and friendly manner. She had not said a word nor made any comment. Now that I am an impartial observer far removed from the actual event, I’m inclined to believe that this silence, which seemed to imply a question mark, concealed a desire to understand. Here was a person waiting to be understood. This candid confession of Berti’s, this attempt at pouring out his grievances, betrayed the modest self-glorification of a man who had lost his confidence in many respects. Juliet had a great deal of tact in this matter. Barring all her faults, there existed in her a second woman who could instantaneously notice the significance of such details. It seemed that she was also the author of the implausibility and the glumness of life. Was she the kind of woman who had preferred to keep silent while listening to the episodes narrated during the early hours of that evening, to transpose them to another time? In order to be able to uncover this mystery one must have the courage to get closer to that moment. To the best of my knowledge, Juliet had not trusted in any of the platitudes expressed during such situations. She said to the man who wanted to proceed on in unison (with a past he could not forget) with a matter-of-fact voice which was at the same time smooth and velvety: “Time now to go dining! We might go from there to a nightclub to dance. We must drive our dull cares away tonight.” Suiting word to action they had dined somewhere where they had discoursed on other peoples’ lives and on attitudes, thoughts, and judgments permeated or prompted by feelings and frittered away the time roaming the streets already abandoned by people. In the meantime suggestions were made to which ears had duly been lent. This scene would remain fixed in their memories as a natural phenomenon both that night and the nights that were to follow. The actual players on the stage and the guest stars were known. At a time when they were lulled into the magic of the night, Juliet had said to the man who was heading back toward her with caution’s steps: “We are burying Marcellina tonight . . . for your sake and mine; in fact, for the sake of us both.” This call, this voice should not go unnoticed; this voice and what it invited. The lover that had been abandoned would remain so forever, a topic never to be touched on again. It appeared that that night was that night in which Berti had felt nearest to his new woman. At the place from which the voice came there was a new sanctuary; his intuitive faculty was driving him toward that sanctuary. However, one cannot deny that the sanctuary, despite its warmth and security, had also been the cause of an inevitable crack, of a silent crack not openly affirmed. One wondered to whom had those footsteps been taken. From whom those footsteps grew fainter? It is true that they had succeeded in burying Marcellina there, nervously obeying that voice’s command. But this had left behind a void that would remain as such; yes, a void; a void whose obscurity and inaudibility was vulnerable to expansion and to be elaborated on in other stories. This void was due to the fact that each of them had interred Marcellina in different sepulchers without letting each other know. Certain breaks, in conjunction with certain concomitant agents, went deep, very deep. Certain families took shelter in those refuges only thanks to these breaks. This option entailed the interment of certain things with their concurrent aspirations and expectations, whose mixed designations were subject to variations depending on the human beings involved, to the time and the feeling in question. The divinities of those lives were tabooed; so were the rituals. Everybody was supposed to know for himself exclusively where exactly he lived, what or whom he lived for. To imagine a night or day cloaked differently would be tantamount to finding one’s reflection in one’s own solitude. The story had to be lived by someone, or had, at least, to have been told or tried to have been told to someone by someone else. However, no matter what had been witnessed and experienced that evening, one thing was certain; and that was Berti’s great affection for Juliet. It appears that Juliet had expressed that night to Berti that she had the feeling that Marcellina had left behind no serious impact. Notwithstanding this observation, it was plain that she also had a clandestine ‘ritual’ buried in her breast. It was as though she also had tried to bury an experience somewhere, a loss, a missing something. I could never make out whether Berti had even realized this. All I knew was the fact that this nagging suspicion, this doubt, a figment of my imagination, just like in my multifarious relations, had effectively increased the attraction I felt for Juliet. She had made me a gift of a new question for which I should be grateful. I had to remind myself that certain women were reborn by virtue of certain questions, or, to put it differently, certain questions that remained unanswered could never be launched into eternity. This was the reason why I had attached special importance to Marcellina who was nestled somewhere in Berti. This led me to the conclusion that Berti could never entomb Marcellina as Juliet would have liked. Notwithstanding, Berti, despite the question mark that Marcellina had left in him, had succeeded in reserving an important place for Juliet in his life. One should not forget that she displayed the merit of a chef in her preparation of artichoke dishes. How could I ever forget the taste! That was the reason why that evening in which all time-worn controversies, solitary confinements, as well as vague expectations and fervent hopes that we continue to entertain, had seemed such a real tonic to me. We had not seen each other for a long time, almost two years. When one considers what we had experienced in the meantime and our previous dialogues, the time-lag should be deemed considerable, an interval of time long enough to generate a desperate longing that would be hard to imagine. But there it was! We could not forestall whatever had been destined for us. We had learned to live through ordeal. When she had suddenly seen me, she had rushed to hug me tightly without uttering a single word, not a word . . . We were locked in a tender embrace for a long time, as though we were trying to recapture what we had missed over the course of two years. We had tried to give this longing its due, feeling each other’s presence, remaining in each other’s arms, even though for a brief moment. I believe that she had, like me, recalled the poetry of beginnings and renewed relationships. I think she had also showed the desire to know if so much bitterness ha
d been necessary for joy, for an unanticipated moment of rejoicing. I had caught sight of Berti whose eyes were full of tears. He was trying to smile. His smile expressed a wry joy. “I knew it you bitch! I knew you’d be coming back sooner or later. But why on earth did you tarry so long! Why did you have to subject us to such an ordeal? You didn’t think that we’d kicked the bucket, did you! I’m here as you can see, body and soul, and still belong to you!” Juliet said. This effusive demonstration of feelings caused us to laugh. We had to force ourselves to laugh, in other words. It was one of the rare moments of my life when tears and smiles mingled . . . I felt myself as a person holding a position of higher standing in a hierarchy of ranks. I had better understood life just as death opened the door to the birth of an unexpected sensation at an unexpected moment. That poem that had inspired me with the idea that all birthdays legislated new laws would in time find a place reserved for him after many a summer.