Strange Times, My Dear

by Nahid Mozaffari

  The events of the book in that historic city mesmerized me, and I confess I had trouble putting down the last pages of the translation. The main character had found the twin passions of his life — Byzantine art and the Hungarian girl — united in one place, and instead of returning to North America, chose to stay permanently in Istanbul. But this happiness was short-lived. One morning he wakes up in the hotel to find that the girl has left him. Had she been kidnapped by her country’s secret agents, or had she used their love affair as a means of escaping from her country with the money and assistance of an American? All these questions remain unanswered, and the story’s protagonist, heartbroken and more cynical than ever before, could only try to blot out everything from his memory by frequenting inns and libraries, and writing and rewriting his documents in that ancient harbor. The only memento left by the girl was a pair of green socks in one of the cupboard drawers. Had the girl deliberately forgotten the socks? Had she been in such haste to depart that she had left behind this pair of socks? (and this was the cruelest answer to the question), or then again, had the roughness of the secret agents coming for her blinded them? It was a depressing enigma.

  The night I finally finished the book, my sight was blurred from the tiny feminine handwriting. What had this woman been thinking when she chose this book for translation, especially in this day and age? It was a novel with all the cliches and ingredients of a bestseller or even a blockbuster film: suspense, romance, sex, the cat-and-mouse games of secret agents of an Eastern bloc ally, and an American hero. But even if it was a masterpiece of its kind, there was still no question of publishing it. I turned off the light, and before sleep could weigh down my eyelids, I pictured the old publisher’s face as I gave him my opinion. Trusting the memory of people of his generation was always a letdown. I laughed out loud in the solitude of the dark room.

  I asked the office boy where the manager was. He had arrived early in the morning. I picked up my pack of cigarettes and headed off to deal with the translation before it was too late. Old Mr. Mehryari, with his translations of French verse which had been thrown at me, had been enough to waste hours and hours of my time. I knocked at the manager’s door and entered his office. But Mr. Mehryari was there. The office boy hadn’t told me that. I had interrupted the conversation with my entrance. The old man was almost certainly telling Mehryari about the difficulties of the publishing trade or the political situation. I pretended I was looking for matches. I shook Mr. Mehryari’s hand with an apologetic smile on my face. The manager gave me a fresh box of matches. He was dragging on his pipe greedily with the air of a novice, and as I was leaving the room, I heard him say to Mr. Mehryari, “This is exactly the case of an object in an unexpected place,” using one of those Arabic expressions he occasionally liked to throw pompously into the conversation.

  I was just getting down to the sociology text when Mr. Mehryari came straight to my office from the manager’s. He came and sat right in front of me, smelling of that intoxicating aftershave of his.

  “So how is our project doing?” he asked.

  He had carefully slicked back his light brown strands of hair. He had a firm, bony, tight-lipped face. He was wearing a brown tweed coat even though the weather hadn’t turned cold yet. I took out the notebook with his translations from my desk drawer. He had clean-copied the poems in blue fountain pen. The manager would say, “Each time I see the elegant writing of this man I am truly saddened. We have to find a solution.” And to silence me he had emphasized, “Nothing is perfect from the word go.”

  “I wanted to have the final say from you,” said Mr. Mehryari, “What should I do?”

  I hadn’t expected to get to the final say so quickly.

  “As I told you, I recommend you read contemporary works,” I replied.

  “I also told you that I’m not totally ignorant of the works of recent poets.”

  I was about to ask whose poems he had read, but I bit my lip. I was fairly sure he would give me some irrelevant answer.

  Mr. Mehryari was enamored of travelogues, books on psychology, and thrillers, and read all of them in the original.

  “I mean literature in general — poetry, novels . . . you know, the Persian language has acquired new capacities for poetic expression, lexicographic nuances, fresh words

  Mr. Mehryari was silent, but I continued.

  “If your translation had come out in Persian let’s say thirty, forty years ago, it would have been a good translation in its own time Mr. Mehryari didn’t let me finish.

  “So you think this translation is not suitable in its present form?” “It needs more work. Maybe another publisher will accept it as it is, but it’s a shame, it’s really a shame.”

  Again Mr. Mehryari fell silent. He was tapping his ash into the ashtray. I noticed his gold Rolex watch; it had a matte finish with a reddish glint to it. His silence was beginning to irritate me. But finally he said, “Well, at the very least I can give this notebook as it is to my friends to read.” He smiled and added, “Maybe I’ll even give it as a gift to someone.”

  “That’s not a bad idea,” I had to say in response. He picked up his notebook and books from the desk. He placed them calmly in a large envelope with which I provided him. He said good-bye and left the room. What else could I have possibly done for him?

  I got up and went to the window. There in front of me on the wall behind the opposite sidewalk were vivid, amateurishly sketched graffiti: faces underscored with slogans urging everyone to rise collectively like a band of brothers against the total invasion of the enemy. Each time my eyes fell on those words, I felt vulnerable. I didn’t have the patience to fiddle with the sociology text. I started pacing around the room. You could still smell Mr. Mehryari’s aftershave. I had rid myself of him, but felt like a person who had slit the throat of a rare animal from ear to ear. Mr. Mehryari was a fan of hunting, too.

  The office boy showed up. “Agha is calling for you,” he said.

  As soon as I entered the manager’s room, he said, “Well? How did you get on with Mehryari?”

  I couldn’t help myself and responded with one of his own pompously sarcastic comments. “You know the parable about the people who took refuge in the cave?” I said. The old man guffawed and said, “I do it, I do it. . .” He lit his pipe and told me with a serious look, “Before I forget, that lady friend of mine has invited us to her house tomorrow afternoon at five. I might get there a little late, but I would ask you please to be there punctually.” Whenever he wanted to discuss something seriously with me, he would use the formal “you.”

  “You’ve read her translation, haven’t you?” he asked.

  “No, I haven’t,” I replied, “there are still a few chapters left,” I lied to the old man.

  That day I didn’t manage to progress a single page on the sociology text. When I came out of the office I felt like talking to someone, so I thought of paying a visit to Fazli in the bookshop. Although it was still daylight, Fazli had put on all the lights inside. He gestured toward the shop’s display window and said, “Look! Just like a wilderness!” He scattered a handful of raisins on the counter and brought over a steaming glass of hot tea from the back of the shop.

  “The early evening used to be the beginning of our sales,” he said.

  His chubby face with the tall forehead gleamed under the light of the lamps. You could never tell he had spent a whole day, and many long years from morning till evening, behind that bookshop counter. His appearance hadn’t changed one iota in the fifteen years I knew him. Only the short wavy hair over his forehead had fallen out. He had carefully and painstakingly arranged the printing samples next to himself on the counter. Fazli did the proofreading and pagination of the books. He had an unfailing eye when it came to proofreading.

  “I’m the last to pull down the shutters in this street,” he said.

  “This shows what a conscientious bookseller you are,” I said, taking a sip of tea.

  “In the old times, when we sh
ut down the shop the night was still young. Nowadays you feel terrified on the streets an hour from now.”

  “Why should a big guy like you feel terrified?”

  “You mean you don’t get terrified? I can’t help it. At home I’m restless like a headless chicken. You’ve got to go out somewhere in the evening. Even if you don’t go anywhere, there’s got to be somewhere you know is open. That way at least when you’re at home you feel at peace. That’s the way I am, at any rate.”

  “I have so much work these days that at night I just want to go home and go straight to bed.”

  “No, I can’t do that,” he said. “I sit by the radio and listen to the news from the start of the evening. After that I fiddle around with the Arabic stations.”

  “Fazli, my friend, forget these things! Just lie down in your bed, close your eyes, and imagine for yourself all the places that are open

  He was munching furiously on the raisins. “This sort of thing is past me. Man, it’s past you, too!”

  I laughed at what he had just said. Behind the brightly lighted windows of the bookshop, the ghosts of peering pedestrians hurried past in the dark. A couple of times I was tempted to lead the conversation around to that woman. Fazli personally knew the who’s who of all the writers and artists. He was even acquainted with the forgotten corpses of the literati. But I could feel that the smallest reference was enough for this old dog of a bookseller to read my hand. When I left the shop, I thought of walking home on foot. Walking would do me good. Behind me I could hear Fazli’s voice telling me loudly, “You’ve got to come over to us one night. My wife will cook you whatever your heart desires; I’ll fix you up with anything else you need myself. . .”

  That night I couldn’t get to sleep. I kept leafing through any literary journals and quarterlies I had left. In the year right after the revolution, when I was really broke, I gave a few series of journals to Fazli to bind and sell at a good price. There was no mention of that woman or her poems. I knew there wouldn’t be. The pages smelled of aging, rough paper. I picked up the yellow folder with the translation and went to bed. I thought of Fazli who, at that moment — an hour after midnight — had fallen asleep with his ear glued to the shortwave radio, listening to music played by an Arabic station.

  For the last time I looked at some passages from the Double Dealing translation. It was the kind of novel that could engage even a fussy reader like me. But was I not mainly fascinated by the background to those events? And wasn’t the reason for this fascination more to do with imposing my own imagination onto a trite romantic thriller? I remembered that even in the most exquisite piece of literature one can find a symbol or metaphor as old as literature itself. I turned the light off to sleep, but sleep wouldn’t come. In a semiconscious state I could see the view of a harbor, at night, with the reflection of lights on water, and it suddenly occurred to me that out there, by the sea, no fate is sealed. I could see myself sitting behind my desk in the publishing office, wrestling for hours with that woman over a sentence. I couldn’t silence her, and worse still, I felt that whatever I knew about writing a clear and proper phrase was so trivial, so useless! The woman had risen from her seat and was scrutinizing me with an air of ridicule. Her eyes were of no particular color.

  About twenty minutes after five, I found myself pressing the buzzer on the building door. When I went up the stairs, on the third floor my hostess had come out to welcome me at the entrance to one of the apartment doors — number 12. I couldn’t believe this was the same woman whose face I had forgotten. Her face was exceptionally familiar — as if I had seen her many times in the past. With a sincerity that felt a little unexpected, she greeted me and led me to the living room.

  “I kept thinking you had lost the way.”

  I replied something about the directions happening to be quite clear, and sat myself gingerly on a sofa. I breathed a sigh of relief. She knew the manager would arrive later and she said, “I would have preferred to have you both over for dinner, but what with the mess here, just before my departure

  I didn’t let her finish and thanked her. While she had gone into the kitchen, I took the opportunity of looking around me. It was a small apartment with bare white walls and large windows, and all the air of a dwelling where the owners had suddenly lost interest and were about to leave: empty bookshelves and boxes, covered by a layer of invisible dust that had settled on every displaced object or knickknack, taking the shine off them. On the wall opposite me were the traces of two large paintings which were now sitting wrapped up behind the door. It looked as if our hostess had temporarily tidied up the furniture to receive us. She had placed a bunch of yellow chrysanthemums in a ceramic vase on a table. I thought to myself that this house and its objects would have been such a place of fantasy under different circumstances.

  Our hostess was saying that the house and its entire contents, down to the kitchenware, had been rented out to a couple she knew. She had returned from the kitchen with two cups of coffee. She was saying that by doing this she had rid herself of the bother of wrangling with peddlers. But there was still more to do. She needed to put her personal bits and pieces in order or throw them out. There were books and drawings that she didn’t have the heart to discard. She was going to take those with her. Lighting a cigarette she said, “I’ve always hated moving. Even the thought of all the things I’ve done in this time, or what I need to get done in the next few days, makes me ill. Just this one reason was enough to prevent me from thinking of leaving all these years. Even now I’m not sure . . . it feels as if everything is temporary. Even going somewhere else is temporary. But it looks as if there’s no other solution.” She put the pack of cigarettes on the table and sat opposite me.

  “Well, you do the talking now. Tell me what you’re doing,” she said, putting the cigarette between her fingers to the corner of her mouth.

  “I don’t do anything special. . .” I replied, following up with a brief and compressed account of my work at the publishing house. She said the old man had spoken very highly of me. I immediately answered that the old man had a habit of exaggerating everything. She laughed.

  “Yes, I know him well; I’ve known him for many years. But I don’t think he means to exaggerate about you, not at all.”

  As she was talking, her glance would occasionally fall and rest upon one of the objects in the room. Was she involuntarily thinking of the things she needed to get done before leaving, or was it her habit to show off, with complete confidence, the exquisite silhouette of her face with that aquiline nose? Once when she turned around like that and looked at me, I could see clearly that her eyes were gray, but capable of reflecting a spectrum of aquamarine to cerulean with their limpid, expressive pupils. I said to myself that whatever had happened had been due to these very eyes. These were eyes with a life of their own. One could easily ignore the rest of her features. Even those few strands of gray hair that had escaped from the wave of her hair on the pale, small forehead. She had made no attempt to hide those few strands of gray hair. All I could do at that moment was to commit to memory an image of her face I was then seeing vividly and tangibly. Her face betrayed no particular age. My shaky hand stretched out toward the cup on the table and I took a last sip of coffee. It was cold and bitter. My hostess finally broke the silence.

  “Did you read the novel?” And without waiting for my answer, she rose and crossed the room. She carefully wiped a record and put it on the stereo, returning to me with a smile. It was a string quartet, and I remembered that I hadn’t listened to music in a long time.

  “Yes, I’ve read it.”

  She lit another cigarette, offering me one too, and then said eagerly, “Well, I know my translation must have its problems, but what did you think of the novel itself?”

  I had prepared some answers, but I said with deliberation, “I have read the whole text once from beginning to end, and some passages even a few times over . . . I’m not familiar with the writer.”

  She seemed to b
e agog with attention, sitting in front of me. I went on.

  “Now that I think about it, I see that the visual descriptions of the places in the story, or should I say the setting of the story, had a lot of attraction for me.” I had the sense of gathering momentum for a theoretical discussion, and for a minute it felt as if I was the young man of letters holding forth for a girl of his own age. But inevitably I carried on, “For instance, for me the description of the nights at sea, and the ship’s bar with its odd customers, was very interesting. But this can be just a subjective thing. To tell the truth, for many years, ever since childhood, in fact, I’ve dreamed of sailing on a ship . . . quite apart from this, the city of Istanbul, the backdrop for an important part of the story’s events —”

  She interrupted me and said, “Ah yes, I felt exactly the same way the first time I read the book.”

  “This novel makes me think of a film, I can’t remember what it’s called, Invincible, Immortal, by Alain Robbe-Grillet. . . That film also took place in Istanbul. It was a wonderful film, in black and white.”

  She was all amazement and smiles as she said, “You saw that film, too?”

  Coming up with the film was nothing short of a godsend. I could have spent the entire time until the arrival of the old man reminiscing about it and avoided giving my view on the book and her translation of it. “Years ago,” I said, “seeing this film at a student film society, I realized what a beautiful city Istanbul is.”

  “I saw the film, too, in Paris. I’ve also seen Istanbul, and this time on my way I’m going to stop over for a few days.”

  She got up and went to the kitchen and came back to the living room once more with two cups of hot, fragrant coffee. “So you’ve seen that film, too, and liked it. . .” she said. “I will think of you in Istanbul.”