A Flash of Blue Sky

by Alon Preiss

  The film began in Kiev on a rainy May Day in 1986, just down the road from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Pripyat, which, unknown to the happy Kiev revelers, had exploded just a few days earlier. Little children were marching in the parade, waving their hats in the air, radioactive mist swirling around them, their toxic, poisoned hair stuck to their heads, smiling big, proud, little kid smiles. Their parents in the cramped Communist apartments above the main thoroughfare waved down, smiling proud parent smiles, as the fog and the rain blew into their bedrooms, clung to their curtains, settled in their carpets.

  A truck rolled out of Kiev, passed an old farmer walking his mule beside a small wagon – the old farmer sweating, wiping his brow with his hat. When the rain came, he turned to face it, smiling into it, opening his mouth and letting it settle on his tongue.

  The camera flew from the old farmer, passed over wheat-fields, shriveling from years of neglect, swam through a stream, then dove deep into the forest, focusing on the shade of a broad oak tree. A woman came out of the forest into the clearing; first her face, peering about, then she stepped fully out into the open, young and completely naked, long limbed, youthfully muscular, she walked a few feet and stretched, let the rain bead on her body. She smoothed back her short, wet hair, and a man’s voice called out from the forest. Someone will see you!, but she shouted back, You don’t know anything, the heat is breaking up, it’s wonderful. You’re an idiot, she added gratuitously, but with a loving laugh. She was a beauty, with her taunting, crooked smile. Emmett leaned forward in his seat and squinted; he wondered if she were here in Istanbul, visiting the mosques, wandering the winding streets of the ancient bazaars, listening to the taunts of men in the cafés, just a tourist, banal, almost unnoticed.

  Back on the screen, the conversation quickly revealed that the two young lovers were named Irina and Kolya. They would soon have to return to his parents’ apartment in Kiev, where they shared the room in which he had grown up. He was also young, darkly handsome in his way, with a small beard and a sad smile. They swam in a small lake nearby and made love on the shore, wet youthful flesh rolling about on the movie screen, then drying in the sunlight as birds sang from the branches overhead. Kolya talked about working in a bottling factory, and Irina said a few things about becoming a scientist. Then they both laughed. He said that he would be a poet, and she said that she would be a doctor. They both laughed again. They would soon leave their graceful Garden behind.

  The film spent the next half-hour detailing their everyday lives. It was too slow for Emmett, and contained no more panting, wanton nakedness, no more deceptively innocent scenes of Edenic splendor. One big splashy musical number seemed to Emmett particularly incongruous. He nodded off a moment, he thought, and when he carne to, the couple was in Moscow.

  A gang of leather-clad thugs, all bald scalp and metal adornment, were beating poor Kolya to a pulp. One stamped on his skull with big leather boots, again and again – Kolya’s head squashed – no possibility of survival. Irina, unaware of her husband’s death, was in the hills in a remote village, speaking with an old woman, hunched and wrinkled. For your nausea, the old woman said, I cannot help. Irina asked, What can be done? The old woman said that there was a cure, in Turkmenistan, and Irina replied, Turkmenistan? They are illiterate there. They are stupid. Not worth talking to.

  The scene shifted. The camera followed a pair of horses, wingless flying horses, who soared high above vast rolling plains, green valleys, towering waterfalls and thundering oceans. The movie was now about something entirely different – Irina was receiving a cure from an old Turkmen woman, who passed her through a green-blue mist; she awoke on the banks of a river, staring into the playful eyes of a young poet named Mahtumkuly, a handsome man in a big furry hat. He attended to her illness between battles – the entire region was engulfed in a vicious clash of warring tribes – and found time to sit with her in the tall grass behind his home and explain in delicate verse and intricate reasoning the mysteries of Love, Health and War.

  By the end of the film her radiation poisoning had abated mysteriously and, disguised as a man in long robe and furry cap, she rode a black steed alongside the poet-warrior, battling invaders from the North. The enemy finally lay vanquished, their bodies staining the valleys red with death. The young woman and the poet embraced beside the crashing Turkmen ocean, in silhouette against the setting sun.

  Emmett had been desperately looking for something to applaud. He had somewhat dreaded the idea of sitting down to write an article panning all Turkish films as derivative and technically unaccomplished, which would have given him an undue reputation for crankiness, and would not even have been worth printing. But this movie was daffy, utterly sincere and completely original. He supposed it was saying that the ancient days of separateness were better than the just-dead days of the Union or the current state of the Commonwealth and was, perhaps, even a subtle Czarist tract.

  Besides, Emmett wanted to do a little star-making, and he felt no shame in elevating Irina’s daunting nakedness to the level of great art. She was air-brushed by God, he might say, uninhibited and undraped, but never less than an actress. He looked around the theater for Rostislavsky, thinking the man might appear to take a bow. But he was nowhere to be seen. The two other audience members who had remained through the closing credits were also looking about for the director, shrugging.

  At lunch, the next day, the third day of the festival, Robert, a Hollywood Reporter columnist, had found something to praise. In the garden patio of a smoke-filled, seedy restaurant, the jolly, mid-thirtyish man, a hopeless name-dropper, had just taken his first sip of Turkish cherry juice. “This is wonderful!” he exclaimed. “Why can’t I get this for my condo in LA? Schickel would love this!”

  Emmett said, “I used to have a condo, when I was a lawyer, but I was lucky enough to unload the thing before the bottom dropped out of the market.”

  The columnist blinked a moment, then cheerfully remarked, “I heard you used to be a lawyer – a friend of mine told me how you went after a top partner with a hammer, right in the middle of his big bald head!” He took a sip of juice. “Well, I say more power to you.”

  I am in Istanbul, Emmett told himself, but he did not quite believe it, as he watched Robert hungrily gulp the cherry juice, then order another, beaming. Emmett felt as though he were in Little Istanbul, in the center of Manhattan, on a bus tour. But such a place did not exist. Everyone here spoke English, the food was delicious, and banished to the very edge of the city languished the unsightly tenement high-rises, the discomfiting squalor of a country whose economy was teetering on the edge of collapse. The civil war was confined to the southern border, in a region known as Anatolia, centered around a little town improbably named Batman. Would he learn anything of Turkey? Could these very European tour guides and fashionable oily cineastes tell him the truth about their nation?

  The restaurant was on the second floor of the mini-mall that also contained one of the theaters playing host to the film festival for two weeks. Inside, businessmen dined by candlelight; outside, in the garden, where it was unseasonably chilly, tourists from France and international journalists drank, shivering. Emmett looked out over the alleyways. From inside a third story apartment, a middle-aged woman, a shawl over her head, stared back intently.

  Emmett complained for a few moments about a film he had seen that morning, Oh My Brother!, by Kadir Inanir, the famous actor now making his directorial debut. The film took place in the dead of winter, and it concerned two country brothers in the snowy town of Sarikamis in eastern Turkey who must decide whether to cut down more than their allotted quota of timber to earn money to feed their families.

  “You’re expecting some kind of great art?” Robert exclaimed. “You know, if Andy Sarris were here, he’d say, ‘sit back, soak up the atmosphere.’ ”

  “I saw a movie called Chernyy Glaz,” Emmett said. “I’ve been trying to track down the director for an interview. And maybe the star of the film
, this actress who – ”

  “Met him,” Robert exclaimed. “Rostropovich, right? Full of shit, full of himself. His film’s a disaster, everyone knows it. The thing’s awful, hasn’t made a dime, banished from film festivals all over the world. Too full of stuff. Is it about Russia, nuclear pollution, Turkmenistan, politics, religion, flying horses, time travel, naked women – what’s it about? It annoys people. And the guy’s a jerk.”

  “But the star, the actress who– ”

  “Met her. Hanging off the guy’s arm last night at Hayal Kahvesi. Bitch. Like the female version of Rostropovich. Her name’s Sveta. Couldn’t stand her. Complete bitch, all stuck up and phony, just exactly like him except that she’s female.”

  The owner of the restaurant, a balding man in a natty Italian suit, came over and introduced himself. “I am Irfan. I lived in America for seventeen years,” he said, smiling graciously. “A beautiful country, but I could not even begin to fathom its mysteries.”

  Robert beamed. “Not nearly as beautiful as Turkey,” he exclaimed. “The people here are magnificent. The city is a treasure. I am overwhelmed.”

  Emmett gestured to the empty chair. Would the man care to join them for a while? Perhaps his conversation would enlighten them on Turkish customs and attitudes.

  “My friend needs enlightening,” Robert said, pointing to Emmett. “I’m afraid he’s somewhat cynical about your country.” Emmett went a little pale. “He’s incorrigibly political. Nothing pleases him. I’ve been here forty-eight hours, and I feel completely free. It’s just like anywhere in Europe, but he still speaks about Turkey’s human rights record, exclusively. I tell him to look around the city– it’s the best movie in the festival, this city, this great, living, moving city. But nothing convinces him. He keeps talking about Ataturk and Zsa Zsa Gabor, as though that was an issue of any importance compared with all of his great accomplishments.”

  Irfan looked distressed. “Keep your voice down,” he warned Robert. “You cannot belittle Ataturk in public.”

  Emmett stared down at his hands nervously. “I try just always to be inquisitive,” he said, hoping to avoid a scene. “That’s my job.” He glanced up. “You see, in America, the Kurds –”

  “The Kurds,” the owner said. His face darkened. “Would you like to know about them?” Emmett nodded weakly. Irfan swung a chair back from the table, and sat. “In my kitchen, I employ two Kurds. The President of the Republic is of Kurdish descent. So what a wonderful country, right?”

  “Right!” Robert exclaimed.

  “They are not the Kurds you see on television, the Kurds demanding their ‘identity.’ They are in Turkey, they speak Turkish, they don’t make trouble. What is an ‘identity’? If you live in Turkey, you are Turkish. Am I right? They don’t blow things up. They don’t demand their homeland. They do not go to prison.” He raised a finger. “Prisons are bad things in Turkey, but they are bad things everywhere.” He paused, letting this common idea sink in. “We have freedom here. Freedom to be Turkish. Freedom not to make trouble. Not to blow things up. We do not like Communists here. Those Kurds, they are Communists. When you have Communism in your head, we cannot change the ideas in your head. So we cut off your head.”

  He shrugged, as if to say: Is that so bad?

  “Anyway,” he said, “that is what we believe.”

  In his room in the Marmara, a Western luxury hotel with a casino barred to Turks that stood alongside crumbling, abandoned buildings in the center of the city, Emmett called Katherine back in New York. He estimated that it would be nine in the morning there, but when he heard her answer the phone, he knew he’d done his math wrong. He began by apologizing, and she smiled dreamily into the phone: don’t worry, she said, and he shut his eyes and just listened to her voice, listened to her tell him how much she missed him. She said she’d been burdening her friends every evening after work, inviting herself and her daughter over to dinner, filling up the time, a temporary widow. “I don’t know how I would ever last five minutes without you in the world,” she said, and Emmett realized that he loved Katherine best of all when she was half asleep and all her defenses were down.

  “How is little Paulette?” he asked, and she said, “All she can say is ‘Buh’ – I think she’s talking about you. She smiles when she says it, but she’s a little sad too.”

  After they said goodbye, he stared at the phone receiver in his hand for a long time, then stood and walked to the window, stared down at the city lights and the boats working their way up the Bosporus. It was Anycity, anywhere in the world. Benny Hill was on Channel 3, patting buns and honking breasts, deliriously unaware of his sudden death a few months earlier.

  The German Consulate in Istanbul was a small building on a side street overlooking the Bosporus, with a garden in the back, the site of a party for the jury of the Istanbul Film Festival. Emmett dutifully attended, and spent a number of minutes watching fat Germans eat crackers and caviar, and drink beer. He spoke to a Turkish film director about the dire straits of his native craft. The big ticket items in Turkey were American films, Emmett remarked, any kind at all, pornography, and Jet Li movies from Hong Kong. “When I go outside, I see Istanbul,” a leather merchant in the vast underground Grand Bazaar had said to him the day before. “Why should I pay to see it on a screen?”

  Everyone seemed ashamed to be a Turk, Emmett noted.

  The director patted Emmett familiarly on the shoulder.

  “Exactly,” he said. “That’s what I’m trying to change. How?” he asked, frowning rhetorically. “I tell how. By following international scenarist trends. By making art.”

  Emmett pretended to take note of that in his pad. Art! Ahah!

  By the bar, Emmett spotted Justine, the festival’s American publicist. She was in her early thirties, late twenties – no early twenties – her age changed every time she shifted an eyebrow, every time she smiled in a different way. Now at the bar, at the German consulate in Istanbul, she was a fifty-year-old drag queen with garishly bright red lipstick, in a tight dress and a blond wig.

  When Emmett remembered the scene, he pictured Justine smoking a cigar, although he knew that had not really happened. When he remembered her calling his name – “Emmett, over here” – he heard a voice as low and throaty as Lucille Ball’s at the 19-something Oscar ceremony, giving the award for Best something just a couple of months before she died.

  “Justine,” he said.

  He’d been searching for a man named Rostislavsky, he explained, who had directed a film called Chernyy Glaz, a brilliant piece of work that he really believed –

  “There’s someone I want you to meet,” she said, interrupting him, and Emmett found himself staring into the eyes of an ageing Turkish starlet, a woman who had become a mega-star with one film in 1979, was forced out of the country after criticizing the military coup, lived in Paris in relative poverty for years, and was just now returning to prominence with the release of a record album; on the album’s cover, everyone noted, she looked incredibly beautiful, as though the last fourteen years had been only a dream. She also starred in a romantic urban comedy, much heralded by the critics, but unlikely to be seen in most of the country, where urban subjects and Turkish films in general were distinctly unpopular. Justine said, “Emmett admires your film greatly.” Emmett had said nothing at all about the film to Justine, had refused to break the festive mood by pointing out that he had hardly seen a single movie in the last few days worth a walk down the block, and only one worth a trip around the world. So he smiled at the starlet; she confided that she had not liked her film very much at all, but was glad for the chance at a comeback. He admitted, to her feigned shock, that Justine had been lying through her teeth. She said a few more things, and he said a few things back, and then he thought she had propositioned him. He could not remember what words she had used. Perhaps the words didn’t do justice to the proposition, maybe it was a tilt of the head, a sharp intake of breath, the meaningful stare, which had made it all, for j
ust a moment, so perfectly obvious. He later told his wife that she’d flirted with him shamelessly, and that he’d excused himself with chivalrous abruptness. (He thought that his abstinence would make her feel reassured, but years later, after his wife’s death, he would stumble across her well-hidden diary and learn that his apparent fascination with the attention of other women, requited and consummated or not, filled her with anxiety. Silly, after all. When he would read a few accusatory passages from his wife’s diary, it would strike him how unfair her distrust had been in the first place. The attention from this Turkish starlet – hardly lascivious! What could be more normal than a foreign film actress, sights set on Hollywood, showing due regard to a New York Times critic? So sad, he would think, that Katherine had never mentioned her worries when she was alive.)

  “She’s wonderful, don’t you think?” Justine said, a half hour later, and Emmett nodded his agreement. He explained again his desire to meet with Rostislavsky, or with the star of the film, a woman named Sveta, whose last name he did not know. “Rostislavsky’s right over there,” she said, gesturing to her left, in the direction of the exit.

  Emmett caught Rostislavsky lumbering out the door, into the garden, and he gently asked for an interview. Rostislavsky had a big black beard, and it was covered with bread crumbs. The Russian asked for an introduction. Emmett complied, adding New York Times. Rostislavsky nodded, unimpressed. “If you would like, walk with me back to the hotel,” he said. “I’m afraid I am leaving Istanbul tonight, and I have very little time.” The two of them passed through the gates, into the cool blue night. They passed an English-language bookstore, decade-old titles turned brown from the sunlight.