Istanbul Was a Fairy Tale

by Levi, Mario

  We clinked our glasses and without uttering a single word we continued to sip at our raki. “Nice song . . . It’s been ages since I’ve been touched by a song . . . ” he said. “We are ever ready to hear such songs . . . Haven’t we left somewhere on our way our dear ones to whom we were deeply attached?” I rejoined. No answer came from him; he had merely nodded in approval. “What wind has swept you here?” he asked afterward. “I really don’t know; but, I may have heard your voice calling me here,” I observed. He smiled at this. “You should make use of it in a story,” he suggested. “I certainly will,” I answered, to which he reacted once more with a smile. “What have you been doing lately?” he inquired then. “Well,” I rejoined, “I’m spinning a long story of which I cannot fathom the end . . . Some of us have gone very far,” I said laconically. He added nothing to this. His looks bespoke the realization of my words. “What about you?” I inquired. There was no answer. The silence was compensated for by our sipping at the raki. I had wished to know of his exploits since I had lost sight of him for a good while. “Yes; how about you? What have you been doing in the meantime?” I asked. The question begged an answer, evidently. His smiling face betrayed a secret to which he seemed proud, similar to the guilty secret of an urchin. “You’d not believe it!” he said. “Don’t say you have resumed your former trade as a musician?” I dared to suggest. With a furtive glance he had made a gesture of hand as though denying the suggestion. Then he said bluntly: “I have a meatball restaurant.” At my bewildered expression, he continued, saying: “You’re surprised, aren’t you? As a matter of fact it was a shock for everybody. However, believe it or not, I’m as happy as a clam. What’s important for me is the conviction that I’ve found what I’ve been looking for. It was two years ago, I had to make a snap decision. Up until then I had been working in that plant; I was listless; I believed that my life had found security; I was entitled to a pension. I didn’t have to work to the point of exhaustion; thus I led a carefree life. One day, just as I was about to quit work and call it a day, I received a file from the general manager. I was asked to study and give a detailed report on it the following morning. I was to stay on the premises until late at night. I had had other experiences of the sort, but that evening I had other fish to fry. Had it not been so, I would have acquiesced to it. The woman whom I knew solely through her voice on the phone and whom I’d been trying to persuade to go out to dinner with me had at last yielded to my entreaties. I hadn’t actually seen her; I’d known her through our telephone conversations. Like in fiction, isn’t it? As a matter of fact, we had been living as heroes and heroines of a fiction during those days. A pure coincidence had brought us into contact, a newspaper notice. One Sunday morning, as I was browsing the dailies just to kill time, I had come across a small notice; a woman was offering her services to those who wanted to learn the Ottoman language. Suppose you felt out of sorts and wanted to find a hobby like stamp collecting, painting, woodworking, gardening, that is outside one’s regular occupation, something you find particularly interesting and enjoy doing in a nonprofessional way as a source of relaxation, wouldn’t you be tempted to dial her up? Without a further thought, I called her up. The speaker at the other end of the line might well have been an elderly lady, one of those ladies of old from Istanbul. However, the velvety voice on the telephone seemed to belong to a young woman; it was like a voice I had been in pursuit of all my life, a voice which had been waiting for me. My initial intention had been to hang up after having learning of her situation. It was not an every day occurrence; a woman was offering her services as a teacher. Well, our conversation lasted for about two hours; what we discussed covered a vast gamut of topics, at the conclusion of which I had the sagacity of giving her my telephone number. I received a call from her the very next day. We talked and talked and recited poems to each other. Not many people know that I love reciting poems. My mother had imported from the East, from her East, an infinite number of poems which she used to read to me on certain nights. Mountains, running water, and small hamlets were often the themes worked upon. Terrors and deaths lurked during those nights. The verses she recited were the verses of forgotten songs. Dirges they were, songs expressing grief and a solemn sense of loss. She used to recite them to me especially during the nights in which she seemed to miss certain things and felt lonely. She used to express her estrangement from Istanbul in this way. I fancied I was nearest to her on such nights. Those verses had inspired in me not only a different solitude, but brought on solitude itself. That’s why I was particularly fond of those verses. This had unearthed my own poems, or caused me to believe that I’d discovered them. The verses I had recited to her on the telephone were exactly the poems that were part and parcel of my being. Her verses, on the other hand, were in a different vein. Our topics of discussion were not poems, of course. We elaborated on life’s major issues, on people we had lost or imaginary lives that we indulged in. It was as though we had desired to pull down the wall between us. We didn’t expect to see each other. I had even sung songs to her. For the first time in ages, I thought I was singing warmly. Three or four months went by in this fashion, engaging in internal talks. One step remained; just one step which we believed was a decisive one, but which we continued to put off. She must’ve been aware, as I was, that this step would be far from easy. At long last I blurted out that we had to see each other. She seemed to be reluctant at first, for fear of disappointment. The disappointment might not be unilateral, she said. She was right perhaps. Ours had been a purely magical experience; the spell might be broken. Yet I was insistent; I asserted that the words we’d exchanged had been in need of a concrete touch, and the worst that we could expect might perhaps be our avoidance of each other’s glances. She understood; she couldn’t do otherwise anyhow. A short time after, as I was speaking about a TV series, she expressed that she would assent to my wish and was ready to face all possible untoward events. I was getting prepared to meet her and was wondering whether the dream I’d had for many years would finally come true. The venue was a restaurant at Kandilli, by the sea of the Bosporus. The story would come to an end on an autumn evening. The hero was coming, having experienced a death whose effects would linger in him for quite some time to come. The death was the death of other human beings; many a life would fade away in oblivion. It may be because of this that the hero had imagined the venue to be an island; having perused the story I’d concluded that actually I was not very far removed from the idea of an island; of an island within us in which I would be seeking refuge. I’d already told her about this story. That restaurant might well have belonged to us. When the report from management was given to me on my desk, I had plainly seen the reality which I then wanted to shun. I felt that it was the end of my career there. Without informing anybody of my actions and being forgetful of all the petty things which I had been dealing with cheek by jowl for so many years, I made myself scarce, leaving all of it behind. On the report I just inscribed in capital letters: ‘DAMN ALL OF YOU!’ I thus repudiated with a sleight of hand the labor of ten long years. They sent for me and begged me to go back to work as I could not possibly leave everything up in the air. But I’d done it, once and for all. What I’d left behind no longer belonged to me. I declined all their calls. I had to face the opprobrium of my colleagues; they failed to lure me back to my desk as I was resolute and firm in my decision. I couldn’t convince them of my opinion and the course of action I had decided upon; I never tried to, anyway. I couldn’t resist the lure of the table I was going to share that night in the company of that mysterious woman. You won’t believe it, but I proposed to her right away, without standing on ceremony. And she accepted. It’s been three years now since we’ve been married. We have opened a small joint where she prepares meatballs. There are no more Sisyphean chores. Colleagues pop in now and then; they say in admiration that I had been right in my decision; the very people who had held me in contempt. I told them that I’d eventually found a place that belonged to me
; a place where I belonged together with those I believed belonged to me,” he concluded. “You might just as well say: I’m with individuals who I think belong to me, who I would like to think belong to me. I’m just fine, and yet I’m here!” I observed. He inclined his head toward his breast as if trying to cover up his confusion and took a sip from his drink. “I wish we had met before,” I remarked. “Indeed!” he said and added: “There should be someone willing to write our story, our stories, in fact.” “Are we not the authors of our stories, of our own stories, at least?” I inquired. “You’re right there,” he answered, “we’d like to return to those days to see how we trod such a path.” We had stopped. Silence was the venue where we had stopped; the individuals that our silence embraced in protection, our hours during which we had forgotten each other, of whose disappearance we had taken stock. Our taciturnity buried our regrets, our desire to recapture the moments when we had died hoping to be resurrected and to return like people who had had the experience of death more than once, as heroes. “Were I to tell all these things, I don’t think I would ever be able to find ears willing to listen to your adventure; they would think I had concocted it,” I added afterward. “Maybe we are lonely just because of this,” he rejoined as though corroborating my observation. “There are so many stories we cannot give voice to; so many episodes we have experienced, the truth of which we cannot convince others of. We are the slaves of these stories . . . ” I continued. A silence had seemed necessary at this moment and we filled the gap by sipping at our drinks. The scent of anise mixed with the odor of the melon associated in us a very long story. There were people who enjoyed this subtlety with discrimination and appreciation. Just like in the case of the discriminating invitation of certain people to certain houses. “Rosy’s episode was for me one of those stories of bondage. One of those stories I couldn’t get rid of for years, stories that I couldn’t bring myself to convey to others . . . ” he said. To which I added: “As a matter of fact, I had always believed that this episode would come back to me, and, what is far more important, that it would bring me face-to-face with a person who has been waiting for me in an old photograph.” His comment had been: “The story you are going to narrate may well begin with these words.” There was irony in his voice, the irony of a wise man. It was as though he had already come across similar stories elsewhere. This was a sense of nakedness that I had once experienced. I was confused. “If I ever have the skill and the opportunity, of course,” I said bashfully. His smile suggested sincerity. “Well, aren’t we here for that?” he rejoined. We were two people who knew how to resign themselves to their fate, how to endure such an experience. We were acquainted with this sadness. As a matter of fact, this sadness had held us united despite our difference in character. We could henceforward be heading for that photograph. “You know what,” he continued, “Rosy’s tragic death wasn’t a coincidence, it’s just not the case, it couldn’t be.” He then began telling the story with the voice of someone who had come to knock on his friend’s door late at night; it was the story which he had kept to himself and could not bring himself to share, even with his wife. He had seen her on more than one occasion, years ago in a café in Moda, seated at a table with a stranger. He had succeeded in hiding himself from her view. Apparently Rosy, who sat composed at the table, kept nodding yes. From that distance he could not possibly guess the words they exchanged. The man seemed to be insisting on something without any apparent hope. Who was that stranger, that guest who had intruded upon her life uninvited? The answer could not be guessed. But that man must have had a role in Rosy’s death. However, this did not go beyond an intuitive presumption. A presumption, but one in which he had had an unshakable confidence. My story of Rosy had ended up at an entirely different anchorage following this unexpected development. There was concealed in that place things unutterable that conjured up death. After so many years that place seemed to have become a secret alcove, a tabooed sanctuary. One should demand nothing more from the past. This land of the unknown could be appropriated by us once more; however, it was a land on which we could lay claim, a land in which we could find shelter. We raised our glasses to Rosy, to those to whom we had not been generous enough in terms of affection. After all, we drank in order to be able to find ourselves. “We’ll no longer be able to see each other; nothing can henceforth contrive for our paths to cross.” He seemed to confirm this. After all, who had stayed there and who was capable of what was evident. “Both of us know the reason,” he said. We certainly knew the reason why we had preferred to assent to this mandatory separation. We knew more things that we couldn’t divulge. These should be the crowning words under the circumstances. The tavern had become replete with clients. Other tables, other times . . . And the people that were seated at those tables were still there. The man’s name was Harun. That was the last time I was to see him. He hadn’t mentioned the whereabouts of his steakhouse.