Istanbul Noir

by Mustafa Ziyalan

  The death of Xenia was the result of a complicated and unfortunate game he could never buy into, he could never understand. When he was burning my loved ones alive he was righting a wrong in his mind, yet what he did indicated how hard it was for him to accept the state of things. Yes, his girlfriend Xenia was in love with me. That, essentially, was the fact he could not stomach. That was the reason why he was rubbing out my loved ones; the massacre he had carried out was not a response to my burning Xenia to death in a hotel room. I’m not fooling myself; I say it in all sincerity: The only reason Nigel killed twelve people I loved was his girlfriend’s passionate love for me. If you asked him, he’d play weird games with his broken Turkish, so you’d see that his profession as an acrobat and juggler had shaped his speech too. He was an acrobat of the mind, a juggler of thought. He knew very well that he could fool others as long as he could fool himself. The way he put it thirteen years ago in Çiçek Pasajı: “If you want others to believe your lie, you first have to believe it yourself. That way you’ll at least have a chance of convincing everybody else of equal intelligence.” During that first lengthy conversation we had, spiced with laughter, Xenia did not look impressed by all his cunning, quasi-philosophical talk; she kept looking at me with a bored expression. You didn’t have to be a genius to realize that she wasn’t enjoying her lover’s conversation, that she did not share the same world with him. Xenia, in stark contrast to the magnificent harmony they created on stage, was remote, disinterested, and cold to Nigel in everyday life.

  When Nigel went to the bathroom, I leaned closer to the young woman and said, in way of striking up a conversation: “You don’t seem to be enjoying yourself.”

  I expected her to say something like, I’m a little tired, but she kept her eyes on me for some time before finally responding: “I’m so bored of him. But that’s understandable, isn’t it? That I should grow tired of listening to the same joke a thousand times? Women like novelty more than men do, that’s why it’s the men who have always been heroes, and women the prizes.”

  I stared at her, my mouth agape. Back then neither Nigel nor Xenia spoke Turkish; our common language was English. I was wondering whether or not I had understood the woman correctly.

  “I’m Count Dracula’s homegirl, you better watch out,” she said, and laughed. She placed her mouth on the red wine glass lasciviously; she puckered her lips, which were the same color as the wine, and sucked the half-full glass dry in one long sip. She closed her eyes, savoring the intense pleasure coming over her; she stayed like that for a moment, then peered at me intensely. She wasn’t smiling anymore; she now looked at me with an alluring, even aggressive invitation. For an instant, her big black pupils wandered sideways; I glanced at the reflection in the windowpane. Nigel was walking back toward our table. Xenia, in a low voice, said: “You can speak Arabic, Persian, English, and Turkish. We can’t possibly find anyone else like you. He is ready to pay twice as much as he offered you. Between you and me.” She smiled again. She had managed to create a secret between us. And a shared secret is an invitation to further shared secrets, and sins. I was mature enough to understand that; seasoned enough to bear the consequences, however, I was not.

  If I had to describe what we experienced after that night in a single word, I’d say “fun.” It was a journey laced with anxiety, victory, and pleasure. Sometimes Xenia did such reckless things that I, fearful of the end of that magical dream, was compelled to rein her in. Her way of groping me, ignoring her boyfriend who stood with his back to us, planting a kiss on my lips before taking the stage, winking at me mischievously while sitting at a crowded table, well within her boyfriend’s field of vision, caressing my legs under the table sometimes … perhaps these and other dangerous games were expressions of the character traits her early Hollywood femme-fatale looks implied; but I was never as aggressive and courageous in keeping up with her as the men in those films. And that spelled doom for our relationship.

  The show was to be staged in a crowded hall in Cairo. That was where I woke up from a sweet fantasy which had lasted for over a year. Nigel was moving about on the stage and in the hall in a fakir costume; he was levitating and performing some improvised exotic dance. Xenia would take the stage the moment the clarinet solo started. She’d be standing in front of the mirror which would convey the images, because the first few minutes of the show consisted of reflections. The audience would see her as an image appearing and disappearing at different spots of the stage. She’d wear a modernized version of a harem outfit, a bustier gilded with gold leaves, showcasing her fair skin with stunning generosity, and a flowing skirt, covered with glittering scales. Every time she made her entrance in that costume, an odd silence would fall over the audience, followed by deafening applause. We were used to it. Xenia was an angel, an image, an apparition which would disappear at once and materialize again somewhere else in the hall, only to disappear again. But that night when her turn came, Xenia did not go out in front of the conveyor mirror.

  Suddenly the music stopped. Nigel came over to where we were. He glared at his girlfriend, who had grabbed me by the collar and was manhandling me. “What’s going on here?” he asked. Just as the woman was parting her lips to say something, a deafening, defiant roar rose from the audience.

  I quickly took advantage of that window of opportunity. “She’s having cramps and asked me for a painkiller.”

  I didn’t know how much of the lie Nigel believed, but he silently turned around, stepped onto the platform where his conveyor mirror was, and said, “We’ll start over. Please find a more appropriate time and place to take your painkiller.” His voice, strangely enough, didn’t sound angry. Nevertheless, I decided to be more careful from then on and to warn Xenia that she should do the same.

  As it turned out, however, I didn’t have to. She managed to stay away from me for eight days following our show in Cairo. She preferred to sit next to her boyfriend, somewhere far away from me, to avoid looking at me, to avoid my eyes, all the while aware that they were on her. It seemed the love affair between the two of them had been revived. Xenia laughed with exaggeration, hugged and kissed him time and again even when Nigel was carrying on with his tasteless jokes like he had when I first met them.

  As you see, everything I’ve told you so far fits the mold of Hollywood melodramas. I can tell you now that the rest won’t be any different. At least, up until a particular point. That point is also the turning point of my short and pathetic adventure, which started with my trying to talk to Xenia backstage before a show in Jordan.

  “We have nothing to talk about, I won’t have anything to do with a coward like you,” she said, before pushing me aside with her elbow and strutting over to the conveyor mirror platform. I followed her.

  “We work together, so we should interact in a civilized manner, even if it will end soon!” I was shouting.

  “Okay, so what do you want?” She had raised her voice too.

  “Come to my room tonight. We should talk.”

  “No, I can’t be alone with you.”

  I reached out and grabbed her arm; in the same instant the spotlight came on. Following some confusion, people in the audience started laughing. My arm and part of my face had become visible next to her.

  “Let go! What are you doing? You’ll ruin the show,” she said.

  “Tonight …”

  “Okay,” she said. “Promise?”

  “Yes! Now go,” she said and started her dance. Everything was ruined.

  Nigel’s headaches had started again. I didn’t mind much when I heard him whispering to Xenia backstage, “It’s time we found someone to replace this guy.”

  Whenever Nigel had a headache, he withdrew to his room and occupied himself with bookbinding. He kept saying that he came from five generations of Hungarian bookbinders, bragging about it at every opportunity. Though I couldn’t really appreciate his craft, I did derive a strange kind of pleasure from the books he bound, as if I was touching some sort of sacred re
lic. While working as an illusionist, he bound books of various sizes in his spare time, to keep in practice so that down the road he could teach his yet-to-be-born son the fine art, and thus keep the family trade from dying out. Most importantly, I recall him explaining that this occupation was the perfect remedy for a headache. I recall him saying to Xenia once: “Why on earth do you take those stupid painkillers? We should just bind books together.”

  That night Xenia came to my room for a few short minutes. “I can’t leave Nigel alone. Let’s talk in Istanbul tomorrow,” she said, and then she quickly made her way, barefoot, across the hardwood floor of the hotel, back to her room down the hall.

  We were in Istanbul the next day. There was a knock on the door, so faint that at first I wasn’t even sure that’s what it was. It was careful, reminiscent of the light footsteps on the hardwood floors in the hallway. I emptied my glass of rakı at once; there was another knock. It was Xenia.

  She was talking with a raised eyebrow; I was trying to listen to her. I perceived what she said as disconnected words, not as a meaningful whole. I recalled images from the night she had come to my room for the first time. Scenes from our games, games she had played with increasing audacity. Now, she had knocked on my door cautiously, she was telling me what a knucklehead I was, she was going on and on about me not having the balls to face the fact that some things were finished. Perhaps she only said it once, but I kept spinning her words in my head and developed the impression that she was repeating the same thing over and over again. I was contemplating the shadows on her face. It was like watching a riveting thriller: The intimacy I once saw in those shapely eyes was fading away shade by shade, being replaced by an aggressive, shrill, even enraged, façade. The skin of Xenia’s face was cracking, peeling away like topsoil in drought and yielding to the features of an ugly, cruel mythological beast.

  I wanted to say, Oh, my Xenia, even if we have to finish everything, let’s do it gently; we may hurt each other, but let’s not ruin all those beautiful moments. Or something like that. Instead, a snarl escaped my lips: “You must die!”

  My voice scared even me. You would perhaps deem me completely crazy if I told you what happened next, using the same words, in the same order that I did during my interrogation. In fact, the district attorney argued that I was acting the part. I can say this much: What I said and did from that moment on had nothing to do with the person I have been historically. Yes, I believe that the human being lives his or her own life as a historical subject. Every moment builds on the one before. Life progresses like the words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters in a meaningful text. Every time I recall what I did to Xenia, I believe in retrospect that I experienced a strange fracture in the flow of my life, the way we pause at an expression at odds with the flow of a text.

  I wasn’t the one who opened the petroleum lamp on the bed stand and hurled the liquid on her. I wasn’t the one who screamed, “You’ve been a witch, and now you should be punished like one, you cunt!” I wasn’t the one who took his lighter out of his pocket, all the while savoring the lines of horror breaking out on her face. I wasn’t the one who swung the burning lighter, catching the flame on her dress. I wasn’t the demon who dashed out and held the door shut as she, engulfed in flames, ran around in a frenzy. Or perhaps it was me, releasing the flames of the hell now in charge of my rage. I made a mistake; just once in my life, I made a mistake.

  I was so sure the smell of burnt flesh, hair, and nylon was coming from my own private hell that I casually took out a cigarette once she had ceased trying to force the door. I remember. I was surprised not to find the lighter in its usual place, in my right pocket, and considered for the first time the possibility that these things were true, that they had happened outside my own private dark world, somewhere within this nightmare called life. I remember. I was walking backwards down the hallway, trying to understand the uneasy mutterings of the crowd gathering close by, trying to piece together a meaningful whole from whatever they were saying. That, I remember. The rest, I don’t. I don’t remember that I ran under pouring rain for hours, wandering with a soggy, disintegrating cigarette between my lips before finally returning to the hotel. I don’t remember being arrested and put in a hospital. The next thing I remember is how someone with a long face and matty hair questioned me, keeping his deep and glinting eyes on me the whole time: “Why did you burn her?”

  * * *

  Nigel visited me two months after I went to prison. He looked as calm as ever, but a little worn out. He stared at me, motionless, for some time. When he parted his lips, as if struggling to talk, lines formed on his forehead and around his eyes.

  “Why did you kill her?” he asked.

  I had lost everything. I didn’t owe him anything. I annihilated something which belonged as much to me as it did to him. I smiled.

  “You watched the trial; everything was discussed there, everything I did was reported in the papers, with details even I wasn’t aware of. What more do you want to know?”

  “You owe me. A lot.” He said this in Turkish. Although not on the same par with Xenia, Nigel too was very adept at learning languages.

  “What do you think I’m doing here? I’m paying my debts,” I said, smiling.

  “I’m talking about what you owe me, not the ones running this world,” he shot back, once again in excellent Turkish.

  “It’s all the same to me. I’ve lost everything. There’s nothing more I can give you.”

  “You haven’t lost everything; there is always something more to lose. Just wait. You’ll see,” he said. He walked away before I had the chance to truly consider his words.

  Three months after that visit I received the first book. Similar to the books previously bound by Nigel, it contained thirty-six pages in a sturdy binder. The binder and the pages were made of Moroccan leather or very delicate deer hide. One More Thing To Lose: Volume I was written on its cover. In it were depicted the painful moments of someone’s life and, on the last two pages, the person’s murder and cremation in his own home. Each of the pictures occupied almost the whole surface of a page and was accompanied by a few words about the person. I thought it wasn’t terribly meaningful to rack my brain over these puzzling words, which at first appeared odd and nonsensical; I put the strange volume in my suitcase. A few days later, I remembered the drawings in that book when I got the news that that my childhood friend lhan had burned to death in his house.

  I reported the matter in a letter to the district attorney with the long face and matty hair. He was good at what he did. He investigated the incident with a meticulousness that was hard to come by in those years, interviewed Nigel, and decided not to press charges. I don’t know what Nigel told him, how he convinced him of his innocence, but I can’t forget those four words the prison director said when he brought me the news: “He proved his innocence.” It was that simple. This couldn’t be the price for a crime I had committed in a fit of madness. lhan was totally innocent here. Why on earth did Nigel kill him?

  I became obsessed with reaching Nigel. It was so unfair to expect an inmate to track down an avenger roaming free outside. There were just a few things I wanted to say to him. When I wrote those down, I realized that whatever I wanted to tell him was exactly the answer to the question he had asked when paying that visit to me. How about telling him why I killed his girlfriend? The guilt that I felt for lhan’s death weighed heavily upon me.

  Just as I was finally beginning to readjust to everyday life, quieting my conscience and soothing my injured ego after months of agony, a new book arrived. It was delivered to me on the anniversary of Xenia’s death. Again, drawings and red ink on delicate deer hide or Moroccan leather. This time I instantly recognized the warm face of my first serious girlfriend. In spite of all those years, the curling lips, arched nose, and slightly crossed eyes of Zeynep, my first love, left no room for doubt. In the following nightmarish days I read the papers, listened to the radio, and lived in fear. It didn’t take long: Zeynep ha
d been found in her house, dead. She was charred.

  I wrote to the district attorney again. I pointed out the similarity between the ways and the dates upon which Zeynep and Xenia had died. I argued that Nigel was seeking revenge and therefore punishing the people I loved in the same way that I had killed Xenia. Two weeks later the district attorney came to see me and reported that Nigel couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with this crime; he had proven that he was performing on stage at the time of the murder. Astonished, I asked the district attorney, “How could you determine the time of death for a charred corpse?” He went through the files he had and hastily read the statements of three witnesses. The super of the building, a shopkeeper of the neighborhood, and Zeynep’s husband, a captain, had all given testimonies clarifying the time of death.

  As the district attorney was trying to convince me, I told him about the tricks Nigel performed with mirrors. I told him about how Nigel was able to project his image onto mirrors and thus appear in more than one spot on the stage. The district attorney rolled the pastel-colored folder in his left hand up into a scroll and with his right gave his knee a forceful and impatient slap; he stood up and cut me off. “Don’t worry, I watched his performance three times. Even if he is doing all of it with mirrors, for him to go from Taksim to Vezneciler, to kill Zeynep, and not only that, but to burn her and then return … how should I say it … is next to impossible. I even arranged for a demonstration to test it. If we brought the suspect in front of a judge, he’d be released after the first hearing.”