by Selcuk Altun
‘Young man, instead of a long-winded conclusion let me just tell you one thing: You’re lucky to have an aunt like her. You won’t be sorry you met her.’
Kinsey professed to love the Napa Valley wine we drank, so I had two bottles gift-wrapped for her and we walked to her car, a twenty-year-old Volkswagen. I felt certain that her previous car was a thirty-year-old version of the same. She pinched my cheek and gave me her card with Emma Hackett Green’s address scribbled on the back of it. I don’t know why I didn’t watch her car rattle out of the parking lot. I felt a strange emptiness after she left. But when I turned to the inviting ocean breeze I felt relieved, as if I’d solved a thorny equation: Santa Teresa was a giant stage set erected for Kinsey Milhone’s scenes.
Back in the lobby a Maxi girl in a miniskirt approached me with a telegraphic sentence: ‘The restroom on this floor is out of order; may I use the one in your room?’
‘If you have a friend with the same problem I can help her out too,’ I said.
Later, after sending the pricey prostitutes away, I pressed my nose against the ocean in my windowpane and shut my eyes to intensify the pleasures of midnight. It struck me what was missing in this 3-D postcard. The aroma of citrus fruit?
*
San Francisco! At first sight I declared it my favorite town in the USA. (I gradually dropped the habit of collecting a harem of cities. Now there’s one city on earth that makes my heart leap, and it’s not Istanbul.)
The minute I walked into my ninth-floor suite at the Four Seasons I cheered up. I wondered when I would have had enough of this marathon hopping from one luxury hotel to the next. The greenery that came closer as I moved closer to the window was called the Yerba Buena Gardens. When I was a student I would go to the park and occupy the bench nearest the entrance as if I were standing guard. I loved to watch the toddlers beam with happiness as their small hesitant steps led them to the grass. Despite my anxiety – ’Does this indicate an incapacity to become a father?’ – I never tired of this amusement. If one of the kids began crying I was hurt to the quick.
I asked room service for a salad, sandwich and grapefruit juice. My order was brought in with Fellini-like flamboyance. They must have been rewarding me for choosing the worst menu in the hotel’s history.
‘3333 B Geary Boulevard, Florence Nightingale School of Nursing.’ There was a quizzical note in my voice as I read the address; the taxi driver comforted me. ‘Could be worse,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen 8300 Geary.’
In order not to start a useless conversation I didn’t ask why a city of 800,000 should have such a long non-boulevard. The hospital looked like a dead whale. The nursing school was an annex and belonged to a nonprofit foundation. In front of the main hospital gate stood a bust of the founding elderly lady; in front of the nursing school that looked like a fitness center stood one of Florence Nightingale. I wanted to believe that sculptures embody the personal marrow of the people they honor. I couldn’t walk by the symbolic nurse without my shoulders straightening and my feet falling unconsciously into step.
There were two bulletin boards in the hallway. On the first was the nursing profession’s oath; on the second a notice politely requested donations and drew attention to the resulting tax deductions. The information desk was manned by a black guard who was born to play Othello. I knew I would not be scolded if I approached him with the deference ordinarily reserved for a judge. Since it was still summer vacation, my aunt was not at school. It happened that the security guard’s father had served in Turkey in the 1960s at a radar station that was then an American base. He gave me Emma Hackett Green’s address and phone number without hesitation when I disclosed her Turkish connection. I had a fifty-dollar bill in my right hand just in case. We were both astonished to see that I put it down on the left end of the counter. He pushed the bill away with the back of his hand and I threw myself out of the place apologizing profusely.
My taxi driver was listening to classical music and I paid no attention to his boasting. When I told him ‘City Lights Bookstore’, he informed me that it belonged to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the last poet of the Beat Generation, who had just entered his eighty-ninth year. He enunciated his words one by one slowly, as if he had a half-retarded passenger in the car. We started off and I asked him to turn down the radio. ‘If you like, I can recite one of the master’s poems for you,’ I said, and without waiting for an answer began declaiming ‘Two Scavengers In the Garbage Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes.’
The fifty-five-year-old bookstore had a certain charm. The only prose work among the dozen books I carried to the cash register was a biography of Hadrian. I couldn’t bring myself to correct the talkative check-out girl who thought I was a literary scholar.
Even if the bar next door to the bookstore hadn’t been Jack Kerouac’s favorite watering hole, its beautiful name – Vesuvio – would have lured me in. It looked as if the all-embracing gloom of this claustrophobic den had gone unchanged for the last fifty years. When the three senior bohemians at the bar looked at me questioningly, I felt obliged to seek their approval by nodding hello. I regarded with envy the junior poets at the crowded tables behind us, with their beards and granny glasses and grungy girlfriends. After my second martini I called my aunt. Her voice was gentle but tired. We arranged that I would bring her the package from Kinsey Milhone tomorrow at two. I would try my surprise announcement face-to-face.
After four drinks I managed to stand up without swaying. I walked down Columbus Boulevard with numbers and words crashing into each other and washing over my mind. I hoped that walking would sober me up. Coming across a 24-hour striptease club, I greeted it with a stanza from Karacaoğlan:
At dawn I stopped at the beloved’s village
Welcome, my love, she said, come in
Putting her rosebud nipple to my mouth
You’re tired, my love, she said, take this in.
Is every suburb in the world half an hour away from its town?
I feared I would fall asleep the moment I set foot in Alamo, that quiet district of the rich. As I stopped people on the street to ask the whereabouts of Emma’s address, I wondered about the residents of the charming villas. The natural flora framing the deserted streets looked like it would quit the scene when the photo shoot was finished. I queried a paper boy who stammered, ‘The street across from the shopping mall that looks like a sleeping dinosaur.’ I mildly enjoyed Stone Valley Way for its lack of postcard glossiness. Its houses were not engaged in a gaudiness contest. The mailbox hanging from the second-last house said, ‘Emma H. – Albert Green.’ The modest house had a miniature garden and an old Nissan parked in front of the garage.
I whispered an Arabic prayer and rang the doorbell. The door opened instantly and I was facing my aunt for the first time. Emma Hackett Green looked about sixty-five and the shirt hanging out of her jeans failed to conceal a few excess pounds. She was outgoing and instantly charming in a thoroughly natural way. It didn’t surprise me to see her take a startled step back. She covered her mouth and chin with her left hand. (I’m left-handed too.) I stood there hoping she would retrieve her brother’s face from memory and recognize me. I couldn’t bear her trembling, however, and said, ‘Instead of a package I brought greetings from Kinsey Milhone. And a surprise from me. To use the name I never used, I’m Adrian Hackett.’
I imagined that she would shriek and rush to throw her arms around me, but in fact she turned her back and burst out sobbing. Before long she pulled herself together – after all, her life had seen plenty of ups and downs before this. Wiping her face with a tissue, she moaned, ‘I knew it, I knew it,’ and then did throw her arms around my neck. Her living room was airy, but I felt that the furniture there was not begotten with the joy of life. Prints of local birds and butterflies hanging on the wall did not soften the room’s rectitude. On the end table next to the leather armchair in which I sat was a framed picture of my aunt, her husband who appeared about fifteen years older, and an underfed little gi
rl. Al, a retired academic, looked like a scarecrow. I was glad that he’d gone to Sacramento. The shy girl looking distrustfully at the camera was their adopted Tibetan daughter. The picture was taken nine years earlier when she had come to live with them, with Virginia as her new name. My honorary niece was now a high school student and due home from summer camp in Costa Rica.
My green tea came in a giant cup. Clearly my aunt was settling in for a long conversation. I went first. It was the third time in five days I had to supply my autobiography and I was getting tired of it. The more I talked, the more I bored myself. As though under an obligation to seek forgiveness, I listed all the prohibitions my mother had imposed on my father’s memory. My voice was louder than I expected as I declared, ‘I’ve never even seen his photograph, much less a line of his handwriting.’
When my aunt’s turn came, she cast her eyes to the floor, a gesture that foreshadowed a concise and political talk.
‘Probably Kinsey already told you that our family life was short on love.’ Her voice cracked as she said this. ‘My mother met my father in Cincinnati where she was working at a bar. For the need of American citizenship she tricked my father into marriage. You know what I mean. Poor woman, she made a terrible choice of victim. My father was talented but neurotic, hard-working but unlucky. He was wounded in the Korean War essentially because of inaccurate information, you might say. He could never accept that he was forced to retire with what they called a physical disability, while his commander was given a medal. He turned into an angry man and a near-alcoholic. Torturing us was his main pastime and of course my mother was his number-one victim. I think all of St Teresa was surprised that she put up with it for so long before she finally ran away.
‘Paul strove hard to keep our family intact and helped me survive that period with the least possible harm. He was not only a model student but at the same time a man of good sense.
‘I’m sure he tried to compensate for his father’s notoriety with his own academic success. Paul tried to open up to life by reading history at the public library and, in his words, dueling with mathematics. Every new act of helplessness by my father was a multiplier of Paul’s resistance. I figured he would end up a good liberal academic because he loved listening to jazz.
‘He was as happy as a child when he got the job in Istanbul. I wasn’t surprised that he married an Istanbul girl, only that she wasn’t an Istanbul Greek. They only had a civil ceremony because of the ruckus in your mother’s family, but they came to America on their honeymoon. My sister-in-law and I weren’t crazy about each other. I didn’t find either her face or her disposition pleasant. Paul said she was a noble and mysterious Easterner and it was only natural that I should fail to grasp her superiority.
‘The next thing to be surprised by was not the divorce but the reason for it. If Paul had to find a lover, and so managed finally to find his soul-mate, it was because of his wife’s capricious ways. When the news hit the papers he lost his job. Muriel was Canadian; they moved to Montreal. After taking a long time to get a PhD there, he started teaching at universities I was hearing the names of for the first time.
‘Our correspondence fell off after my brother moved to Canada. I met Muriel twice. She was a beautiful and naive person. She treated Paul with a blown-up respect, like he was the greatest scholar in the world. I heard about their marriage two years after the event. They didn’t have money problems. Your father resigned his jobs often and went through long periods of not even looking for another one. Yet he was always irritable. He seemed to be waiting for bad news and nobody dared to ask him why. Muriel called me for the first and last time to give me the news of her husband’s death. They were living in Vancouver. As Paul was leaving a bar suddenly a jeep came out of nowhere and hit him and then vanished. My brother had a drink now and then, but he couldn’t really hold his alcohol. On the night of the accident he was apparently drinking with a middle-aged man that nobody else knew. They left the bar separately.
‘You were very precious to your father, Adrian. Your mother used a bag of tricks to prevent you from getting to know each other. When you grew big enough to go out and play in the street, he used to come and watch you from a distance. In the second year of this your mother sent her men to give him a bad beating. He always had your baby pictures in his wallet and in his house … ’
At this point in her monologue she leaped up and fetched an album with photos of my father. Trying not to see his sad face, I turned the pages quickly. Suddenly a five-by-seven inch picture fell out. The man trying to smile at the camera eye was my father, and the startled baby holding his hand was me. On the back of this photograph, taken on my first birthday, was written:
Dear Em,
Adrian is one year old. He started walking a month ago. He will come and visit you one day.
With all my heart,
P.
My aunt was enjoying the situation’s implications, while I was astonished. If it was indeed my father who wrote those lines, I’d found the answer I was looking for. The handwriting was identical with that of the photocopies. I knew I should not be too hasty to invent conspiracy theories. This probably wasn’t sufficient evidence to associate my father with Nomo, I told myself.
To make my aunt happy, I took the picture. We said goodbye to each other and promised to get together again but neither of us believed it. A taxi waited for me in front of the house. As I got in, it occurred to me that the men who attacked my father in Galata could also be working as secret agents put on my own trail by Nomo. I felt I should properly introduce myself to this organization that might one day be my savior, and the next my executioner.
I read Hadrian’s biography on the San Francisco-New York and New York-Istanbul planes. If you omitted the religious factor, he and Fatih might have been (up to and including the whispers about their sexual preferences) soul-mates who ruled the greatest empires of the world like chess masters.
ETA
With the approval of the Doge of Venice, Enrico Dandolo (1107?-1205), the army of crusaders who had lingered in Constantinople for ten months instead of continuing to Egypt commenced to plunder the town. Historians, noting their extreme violence, have described how the pious looters who set out on their crusade for the love of God ended up plundering the houses of the poor and killing young and old without exception, even raping the nuns. At the end of the third day the 900-year-old capital of the world lay in ruins, and the magnificent complex called the Great Palace was totally destroyed.
The puppet Latin Empire founded by the crusaders would limp along for fifty-seven years. Michael VIII Palaeologus, the usurper of the Byzantine throne in exile, expelled them from Constantinople in 1261. He then settled into the Blachernae Palace that butted up against the land walls, away from the city center. Because it had been built in the twelfth century and was now the home of an emperor, he had it remodeled. The Ottomans called it the Tekfur Palace, a derogatory appellation since ‘tekfur’ meant feudal lord and that was no way to address the emperor of Byzantium.
I remembered these details as I walked along the street of the Chora Monastery – now the Kariye Mosque – toward the palace ruins. I was satisfied with the quietness of the street. I refrained from asking the precise whereabouts of this 800-year-old legacy of our (?) family. Later in the morning I heard first a rooster, then a jackhammer, but there was neither chicken coop nor construction site to be seen.
The improvised duet continued until the palace walls rose up before me. I went up a short rise near Hoca Çakir Avenue, afraid I might miss an important clue to the puzzle if I skipped any part of the walls. The crude restoration work made them look like patched clothes. It didn’t upset me to see that, as a reaction to this barbaric enterprise, the symmetrical indentations had been turned into toilets and garbage pits. Two recesses that looked like caves had been transformed into makeshift warehouses by a carpenter and a greengrocer. I wondered who on earth the moustachioed men working there paid rent to. In front of the walls was a ba
rricade of garbage containers. As I walked by, some street cats jumped in and out of them in panic. I climbed a rickety staircase to the top of the wall. On the plot of land between that point and the E-5 motorway was only one building: the Tekfur Palace. The rest of the space was dedicated to a children’s playground, a car park, and sports fields.
From a height of sixty feet I surveyed the movement on the motorway. The hum of a flood of motor vehicles swelled like a chorus, then receded as if it had hit a breakwater. I was satisfied with the music, and resumed my stroll toward the Golden Horn to see the palace up close. The highway curved in parallel to the curve of the walls. Between them was a park containing a kiosk that looked like a dead bull. A few puny olive trees grew in front of it and I was reminded that an olive tree could live a thousand years. Maybe these saintly-looking trees had breathed the same air as my ancestors. Where the park ended I saw the gate to the palace. It had bars like a prison and a sign on it that said: ‘Restoration in Progress. No Trespassing.’ In truth there was no restoration in progress and I was certain that nobody knew when or if such work would ever start. From outside the bars the palace at first glimpse looked like a mammoth skeleton. Looking at the façade more carefully, I noted a kind of ornamental symmetry. I shut my eyes to imagine how glorious it had been in its heyday, but the image lasted no longer than a sonnet. When I opened my eyes, I was appalled by the sight of a palace that looked like a nun who’d been stripped of her garments, raped, then beheaded.
I wondered about the last hours of Constantine XI at the palace that now served as the base for an army of pigeons. I continued my descent toward the Golden Horn as the noon prayer call began to rise in unison from the city’s 3,000 mosques. Bushes grew on these jaded walls, and small trees grew in the gaps. Neither history nor nature could complain of this symbiosis. A small but neat Ottoman cemetery nestled on Eğrikapi Street where the walls ended. I made a note to myself to come back and read the epitaphs later. Cars and trucks were passing beneath an arch that divided the cemetery into two; I made this my landmark. At the time he settled into this palace on the edge of the city it was said of Michael VIII – who stole the throne from the seven-year-old emperor he was supposed to protect by putting out his eyes – that he would flee ‘at the first chance’. But he turned out to be a leader who fought for his country; and when he died, his burial without a funeral ceremony was an oriental irony.