by Levi, Mario
The odor of cloves creates other memories in me when I ruminate over these things. I remember that the atmosphere of the synagogue that my maternal grandfather used to take me to was permeated with the essence of cloves. An ancient silver burner, reminiscent of a big perforated lemon or artichoke, associated in me the maces of old containing cloves that were swung to and fro; the burning of incense took place after a short incantation. This must have been thanksgiving for God’s creation of perfume. Those moments were the most pleasant moments of the ritual. All prayers have been indelibly inculcated in my brain and have survived to this day, probably thanks to that perfume. This was an eleventh hour prayer; a prayer that lingers in my mind, a prayer I’d like to carry about with me forever. I cannot remember the contours of the people in the background. The only thing I remember is the radiance reflected on the faces of the congregation during the Sabbath. The devout passed the remaining time either in the houses of their relatives or in their own homes. For my part, if it was summer, I used to go to the Caddebostanı beach for a swim, and, in winter, my recreational interest dragged me to a movie theater. That was the time when the sea of Istanbul had not yet been polluted; the beaches were still populated by a host of people, a time that seems very distant today. Some preferred to hire a special cabin with a key, which was a way of displaying one’s privileged position in society, instead of changing in the cabins which allowed any one person to change in succession. The difference was obvious; those who had paid for a special cabin used to come out with only their towels while those who changed in the public cabins had to take their clothes with them to the beach. Those cabins would in time create other associations in me; associations related to the passionate moments of our adolescence; in those cabins illicit love scenes were a frequent occurrence. All these things were all the more pleasant during the days when the south wind didn’t blow. The south wind brought ashore watermelons, grapes, algae, and jellyfishes whose origin was a mystery. No weather forecast could, at the time, predict the changes. We used to be beachcombers along those shores . . . on the shores of our childhood . . . with our little steps . . . in our solitudes . . . with all our secret passions pregnant with the sadness that they aroused in us at any moment. This is the way the door to old stories is opened. Having gone through different individuals and tried new faces, your stories turn you back to your losses that are more easily stowed. In this way you can bring yourself to live the words you liked the most, words which are never-ending in your city, which can continue to exist in at least a few people through visions nurtured by those words. In this way you can ask yourself the reason for one’s belief, firm belief in certain people, in certain things to the bitter end, without any fear of your past or the shadows you left behind. For whom had you been experiencing that passionate love, why and for the sake of which worlds? Those little squabbles at home, would they be considered worthwhile to be contemplated and inquired upon by other people once the contenders had vanished into thin air? When one ponders on the probable answers to such questions, be it myself or others, it really does not matter under what circumstances, where and when I was born and raised in Istanbul. We might, off-hand, speak of the demeanor of a child, of a witness, trying to solve the mystery of the world within him, having recourse to new languages. Under the circumstances, there is no sense in brooding over in which schools I had studied, which of my toys I had lost in which of my dreams. Every one of those individuals has gone away to a destination detached from his fellow beings’, every one of those individuals spent years hoping, experiencing, and yearning; hopes, experiences and yearnings different from those of his fellow beings; every one of those individuals has vanished in the distance. When I look back in the light of what I can descry, I realize that many lives are wasted, what could be lived at present was being put off to the next day; that certain regrets are rendered meaningful by silence and that fears guide experiences. One thing I know, however, is the meaning of preferring to dissolve, by appropriating certain people with certain personas. I have not tried to understand or to explain in vain, looking back at my past, the history one could not put into words, the moments in which you were reluctant to face yourself and chase away the voices you preferred to forget in the shadows of the past, of the nightmares you wanted to get rid of despite your hopelessness in taking into consideration all sorts of repetitions. What I tried to put into words were those moments during which I kept walking back and forth in my room, from one corner to the other covering long distances, making myself believe that I had been walking on an interminable road—those recurrent nightmares. You feel that something is loosened in your legs during those long walks. You feel you are being followed in the silence of the night. To lie in that room is tantamount to hallucinating. The occupant of that room was a child who had confined himself there, who tried to speak about the green almond eaten in the shell although he had never tasted it in his life. The green almonds belonged to another spring. The clock indicated another time. This might have been the most proper and reliable way of patiently feeding that waiting and dreaming, that certain people could come before others in the proper sense of the word, after a lapse of many years. At the head of my bed was a weeping woman whose face, whose real face I was not able to see . . . My dream would not come to an end . . . I would try to change that dream by putting it on paper and hiding myself behind words of my choice for which I had a predilection and affection.
Everybody has a story which he takes to be lost, which he tries to collect bits and pieces of for the sake of the preservation of his life. To have lived several years in the company of individuals that seemed alien, to have studied in schools one has disdained and to have toiled day and night in disagreeable jobs, to have been fancying that one feels exiled where one lives, imagining the ideal jobs awaiting one somewhere else day and night . . . all these things . . . do they imply efforts to return sooner or later to one’s own small world? I do not know. Either I don’t know, or I prefer not to know, and confine myself within the boundaries of a single answer. Yet, I should like to think that the very act of asking this question brings me to that human being I have been looking for all these years and never given up the hope of finding him. To return, to return after a series of departures means to desire to enter a new room unvisited until that point. One wonders what sort of a room one penetrates after so many years. Who will be facing you in that room as your step into it? Beyond the boundary, you are alone, whether you like it or not. At such moments, beyond the boundary you hear your own voice . . . It is time you touched it with your hand . . . you have to touch that face. Other people’s geography has brought you gradually to those regrets and deep scars, the story of which you can tell only to yourself. When I consider all those questions and returns I find myself asking where exactly I happen to be in the midst of those little victories and those defeats I always tried to hide and cover up, in the midst of the fantasies bordering my imagination and of my realities, of ‘that family’ that I’m trying to reconstruct with what I could gather from other families. At such times, I feel dejected; it is meaninglessness, an abandonment which I could share with no one. I find myself once more at a crossroads. I’m faced with a dilemma: either to beat it, consigning to the body of an ordinary human being all the variations, associations and absurdities within me, or to continue on the road of that old story in search of new words. I have always wanted to describe this hesitancy; perhaps I will be carrying this hesitancy around with me till the end of my days . . . even though I am aware that certain emotions will never be able to find the places reserved for them and even though I cannot ignore this fact. I must say I’ve been obsessed by the idea of describing those human beings for many years. My dreams might have had the objective of describing those brief moments of love making, of reviving those true moments, of finding that brief span of happiness. For that brief span of happiness likely to associate in one those brief moments of joy. That story whose end was far from being predictable had a magic spell;
it was as important to live the story as it was to tell it. This long story must have had a share of my desire to be seen as a volunteer exile on an island where I would narrate my recollections to a native, from my own island, inspired by the author of a work I can never forget, during those days when I used to shuttle with clumsy steps between unrealized dreams. I had many reasons for reproducing my delusions and illusions. This small dream inspired me with the idea of arranging a meeting in which the individuals whose writings I wanted to share would come together on my island for that very purpose. For that island reminded one not only of exile and thralldom, but also of the exigency of collective life. That island had been the selected venue where people would come together, a locale where a wish to remain separated, to be protected, to share a privacy might be realized to the extent the prevailing circumstances allowed. They might be inclined to act out once more the personas they would never symbolize. It was necessary to postpone the retaliations to an unknown date, and to forget the relations that secretly stole from certain people the possibility of contributing to the incidents that had occurred. However, as I made headway in the story I realized that this dream, this meeting, would never become reality. Everybody was lost in their own respective solitudes. Everybody was in his own exile. Everybody had a smile that he or she would not be able to express and would have preferred to keep to themselves. Platitudes meant that everything was alright, like in all climates. Walls had to be raised. Walls would always be raised; otherwise, I couldn’t explain our being dragged to new islands of solitude when we wanted to live, truly live, for a very brief period of time with our fellow beings. The deafness we had to experience in the places we thought we had to visit. We had to ask once again where, in whom, and when we had lost the keys to that adventure . . . We had been called there sometimes by a look or by a word . . . only a look or a word. In order to understand and decide, which is more important, which defeats we had suffered in consequence of which dreams, we had to live our true losses . . .
( . . . ) Did that time include my experiences during which I had been newly acquainted with the walls of my primary school or those moments when I had to show up in my green pinafore rather unwillingly at the flag ceremony on Saturdays? Is it hovering over my memory at present? The brilliant students were rewarded with the privilege of carrying the flagstaff. I personally had that privilege once. But I could tell no one my distress for having to carry that heavy burden with my puny body in the presence of that crowd, it seemed appalling to me then; the so-called reward had been a punishment. In holding the flagstaff I was helped by mistress Türkân, whose smiling face and full breasts are still in my memory and whom my mother had sympathized with on account of her short-lived, unhappy marriage. Those were the mornings when smiles drew me toward a warmth whose real source I could never find. My failing to compensate for the coldness of the school despite my affection for mistress Türkân might perhaps be explained by my remoteness from that source. I was making headway toward a nightmare. The sound of cutlery coming from the refectory and the loud laughter of my fellow students heralded a fear I could not define. I was on the brink of turning inward. I well remember my diffidence in failing to ask permission of mistress Türkan for answering nature’s call during the class and the consequent incontinence and the distress felt in remaining in that condition till my return home might have been due to this. Moreover I wasn’t used to the old style toilets without a bowl. The hole on which one crouched was so large that I had dreamt of children just like me falling into it; the children who could not pull themselves up despite their best efforts. Adults haunted that place, but they didn’t see or hear me. Only one had turned his gaze toward me and looked at me with a broad smile and appalling eyes. I had tried to shout but without success. He was smiling; he seemed to know that I could not shout or make myself heard. That speechlessness and that silence, were they really the darkest alleys of those nightmares?
( . . . ) Dreams or things left behind somewhere as though in a dream . . . I wonder in which of my writings I had tried to announce that odor, an odor that can never be forgotten, one which gave life to a city. I can remember, for instance, the smell of chocolate coming from the Nestle chocolate factory which pervaded the air of my primary school next to the Bomonti brewery, spreading as far as the house of my grandmother. The streets breathed a different atmosphere at those hours. I was to visit the origin of that odor one day in the company of my grandfather. The enormous cauldrons where chocolate was made are still in my memory. A man by the name of Master Yorgo, a man of very old aspect, perhaps due to his hoary hair, had tasted the confection and said something to the apprentices around him. I had wanted to taste it as well. “No, Sir,” he said, “the chocolate is not ready yet.” Before leaving the plant we had been given bars of chocolate as a gift, the same bars of chocolate available in the market. Master Yorgo knew my grandfather from the time of his military service. There was a longstanding connection between them, a connection that could not be soiled by equivocations. Everybody had had to climb his own ladder to professional perfection. For me, the magic lay in the mystery that that confection in the cauldron contained. By the way, the smell of meals in the process of being prepared had appealed to me as much as their tastes and flavors. Those smells associated in me the places to which I could not have access. This may have been the reason why certain people had occupied those houses in my imagination.
In this outlandishness there lay concealed the traces of what I had experienced during those midday meals on Fridays at school. As the mealtime approached, I began waiting impatiently for my grandmother who brought me in lidded meal containers of hot meatballs and fried potatoes, the taste of which is still lingering on my palate. On one of those Fridays there had been a heavy snowfall. We were in the refectory. The meal had been distributed. I felt uneasy. This restlessness had prevented me from laughing at the clowning of Selahattin, my bosom friend at the time, who drank his soup emitting a hissing sound disregarding the admonition of his teachers and its being splattered about, when he had grown up he had taken to climbing mountains after having failed to realize the Demirkazık climb during the winter sports months following the marriage of an alpinist he was infatuated with to another alpinist, both of whom finally opened a little shop at Mercan. My grandmother had arrived in the middle of the meal service. I can still remember her distinctly as she came down the stairs with a smile on her lips. She had made it in spite of the blizzard outside. Yet, the icy soles had made her fall and she had to descend the staircase at a more rapid pace than otherwise foreseen, on her buttocks. Uncle Dursun had rushed to her aid; he gave a helping hand to everybody and was often reproached not only by our headmistress or other teachers, but also by certain parents, for his awkward manners although he did all the handiwork in the school. He fixed the malfunctioning electrical gadgets, kindled the stoves, plumbed the sinks, stayed overnight in the school, and befriended the boys by his mimicry of animals. No harm was done. “Your packed lunch! Your packed lunch!” cried my fellow students in hoots of laughter. Selahattin had a gift of keeping cool; and being furious at his school fellows for their guffaws, he had thrown forks and spoons at them; for which he was sent to stand in the corner on a single leg for half an hour by mistress Müzeyyen, nicknamed ‘the ramrod,’ in doing so setting a record hard to break.
However, that was the last of the meals brought to school. I had asked my grandmother to stop. In those days I could still imagine the possibility of getting lost in others and behaving like other people. In the long run, I would realize how fascinating the dream I had been chasing was despite all the disappointments. When one considers those disappointments, one cannot help concluding that the school was a locus criminis, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
A long time thereafter, I tried to remind my grandmother of those days. She was an aged and senile woman lying in bed silently in one of the shabby old rooms of the French hospital. She had had a sudden obstruction of a blood
vessel by an embolus; not only did she suffer from amnesia, but she had also lost her faculty of recognizing people. It was my only night of vigil at her bedside. She had nodded with a smile as though she understood what I had been saying. Had she really? I doubt it. It may be that she had visions of her past life that she could not share with me. Time-honored visions she couldn’t communicate, visions whose witnesses had disappeared without exception, and consequently without possible testimony from someone. I wouldn’t have the pleasure of secretly sneaking her the food the doctor had prohibited anymore due to her high blood pressure. Those days heralded the end of my boyish aiding and abetting. One day she had ceased to utter a word and remained in that state for days. I cannot exactly say when we actually parted.