The Strange Journey of Alice Pendelbury
Page 21
When evening comes, Can and I return along the same streets. We take the bus and then the vapur. Often it’s cold, and we have to wait a long time before the boat comes, but I mix in with the other passengers, and every evening I feel a little bit more like I belong, like I’m one of them. I don’t know why I enjoy the feeling so much, but I do. I’m living by the city’s rhythms, and I’ve taken a liking to it. I’ve convinced Mama Can to let me work every night, but it’s because I enjoy the work, not because I particularly need the money. I like weaving between the customers, hearing the cook shout because the food is ready and I don’t come fast enough. I like the friendly smile of Mama Can, who claps her hands and scolds her husband for shouting. When the restaurant closes, Can’s uncle yells one last time to call us into the kitchen, where we sit around a big wooden table. He puts down a tablecloth and serves us the kind of dinner I know you would love.
Those are the moments of my life that make me the happiest—happier than I’ve ever been.
I haven’t forgotten that I owe it all to you, Daldry. You and you alone. I’d like to see you walk into Mama Can’s restaurant one evening, to introduce you to her family and her husband’s cooking. It’s so good you’d cry. I miss you and think of you often. In your next letter, give me more news. Your last letter said nothing about what you were doing, and that’s really what I wanted to hear about.
Your friend,
Alice
Dear Alice,
I ran into the postman this morning, and he gave me your letter—or rather threw it into my face, cursing. He has been in a bad mood lately and hasn’t been speaking to me since I’d started worrying about not having heard from you. I kept blaming him for having lost your letter and eventually went down to the post office to make sure that they hadn’t misplaced it. I swear it’s not my fault, but I got into an argument with the man behind the counter because he refused to believe that one of his postmen might have made a mistake. To believe him, His Majesty’s post has never lost a letter! I think there’s something about the uniform that makes them so sensitive to criticism.
And now, thanks to you, I have to apologize to both of them. In the future, if your busy schedule means you don’t have time to write, please at least take a moment to write to say so. Just a few words would be enough to calm my needless worrying. You have to understand that I consider myself responsible for the fact that you’re in Istanbul alone, and I want to be sure you remain safe and sound.
I’m overjoyed to read that you eat lunch with Can every day and that your friendship continues to blossom, although I do find a cemetery a rather odd place for a meal. But if it makes you happy, I have nothing against it.
I’m also very curious to know more about the development of your project. If you’re looking to recreate the odor of dust, there’s no point in you staying on in Istanbul. There’s dust aplenty in London, and to find it, you wouldn’t even have to leave home.
You ask for news from my life. Like you, I’m hard at work. The Galata Bridge is starting to take shape on the canvas, and over the past few days I’ve been sketching the figures that I’ll place upon it. I’m also working on the details of the houses in Üsküdar. I went to the library and found some old engravings of the Asian side of the Bosporus that have been very useful. On most days, I leave the flat at noon and have lunch at the end of the street. You know the place, so there’s no point in me describing it. Perhaps you remember the widow who was sitting by herself at a table near ours the day we ate there together? Good news: she seems to be out of mourning and has met somebody new. Yesterday she came in with a man her age, rather shabby looking but pleasant enough, and they had lunch together. I hope it will last—perhaps they’ll even fall in love. Why not, even at their age?
At the beginning of the afternoon, I usually go to your flat, tidy up a bit, and then paint until the evening. The light has been a revelation, and I’ve never worked so well in all my life.
On Saturdays I go for a walk in Hyde Park. With all of the rain we’ve been getting, I rarely see another soul, and I like it that way.
Speaking of running into people, I did happen upon one of your friends in the street earlier this week—a certain Carol, who spontaneously came over and introduced herself. I remembered who she was when she brought up the evening that I barged in on your party. I took advantage of the moment to apologize for my behavior. The knowledge that we had been traveling together and the hope that my presence might be a sign of your return had emboldened her to reintroduce herself in the first place. I told her that you were still in Istanbul, but we went and had tea together, and I took the liberty of bringing her up to date on your activities. I didn’t have the time to tell her about everything, because she had to start her shift at the hospital where she’s a nurse. Well, of course you know that—she’s your friend—but I hate scratching things out, so you’ll have to live with it. We’re going to have dinner together next week so I can tell her the rest of our stories from Istanbul.
Don’t worry, it isn’t a bother, she’s really quite charming.
Well, that’s all there is to say . . . As you can see, my life is far less exotic than yours, but like you, I’m quite happy.
Daldry
P.S. In your last letter you mention Can picking you up at “home.” Are you suggesting that Istanbul has become your home?
Dear Anton,
I’m afraid I have to begin this letter with some sad news. Mr. Zemirli died at home last Sunday. His cook found his body, still sitting in his armchair, when she arrived on Monday morning.
Can and I went to the funeral. I didn’t think there would be many people, but to my surprise there were about a hundred of us in the procession to the tiny cemetery where he was buried. It seems Mr. Zemirli was a sort of living encyclopedia to everyone in his neighborhood. The people crowded around his grave and remembered with both laughter and tears how he had more than managed to live a full and rewarding life, in spite of his limp. A man in the crowd kept looking at me during the ceremony. I don’t know what came over Can, but he insisted that I meet him and we ended up going to a tearoom in Beyoğlu together. He turned out to be Zemirli’s nephew, but stranger still, the owner of the musical instrument store where I bought that trumpet, you remember?
He seemed very affected by his uncle’s death.
I’m delighted to hear that you ran into Carol. She’s got a heart of gold and she’s a wonderful nurse to boot. I hope the two of you had a nice time together.
Next Sunday, if the weather has improved, Can, Zemirli’s nephew, and I are going to have a picnic on the Princes’ Islands that I told you about. Mama Can makes me take Sundays off now, so who am I to disobey?
I’m glad to hear that your painting is coming along and that you’ve been enjoying working in my flat. I like imagining you there, paintbrush in hand. I hope that when you head out of the door every night you leave a little of your color and your madness behind to keep the place alive until I return. (Yours is usually a good sort of madness—take it as a compliment between friends.)
I often intend to write but feel too worn out to carry through with it. And here I am at the end of another letter that feels too short. I’d like to tell you a thousand other things, but I’m about to doze off.
Your faithful friend, who sends you affectionate thoughts from her window in Üsküdar every night before going to bed,
Alice
P.S. I’ve decided to learn Turkish, and I’m enjoying it a great deal. Can teaches me and I’m coming along quite quickly. He says I speak with almost no accent and is proud of my progress.
My darling Suzie,
Who, pray tell, is the Anton you had on your mind when you wrote your last letter to me? (A letter, I might add, that was no quicker in arriving than the previous ones . . .)
If I weren’t such a stickler for never crossing out, I’d start again. You must think I’m in a dreadful mood. Which I am, to an extent. I’m not at all happy with the way the painting has been progre
ssing (regressing?) over the past few days. I’m having a great deal of trouble painting the houses of Üsküdar, particularly the one where you live now. From the Galata Bridge, where we once stood, they seemed so tiny, but now that I know you live there, I want them to seem immense, or at least recognizable enough to see where you are.
You failed to mention your work in your last letter. I don’t mention this as a concerned business partner, but as a curious friend. How are things going? Have you managed to recreate the illusion of dust, or would you like me to send a little sample from home?
In other news, my old Austin finally gave up the ghost. I know it’s not nearly as sad as the loss of Mr. Zemirli, but it wasn’t easy to leave her behind at the mechanic’s. On the other hand, this has given me an excuse to waste a little more of my inheritance, and I intend to buy a new car next week. I hope, if you ever come home, that I’ll have the pleasure of seeing you drive it.
Your stay seems to keep dragging on, so I took the liberty of paying your London rent directly to our landlord. Please don’t make a fuss about it. It’s completely normal for me to pay the rent as long as I’m the one using the place.
I hope that your outing to the Princes’ Islands was as pleasant as you had anticipated. Speaking of Sunday outings, I’ve let Carol convince me to go to the movies this weekend. Very original idea on her part, actually, since I never go to the cinema by myself. I can’t tell you what film we’re going to see because she’s keeping it a secret, but I’ll tell you about it in my next letter.
I send my affectionate thoughts from your flat, which I’m about to leave for the evening to return to my place.
Until next time, Alice. I miss our dinners together in Istanbul, and your stories about Mama Can and her talented husband make me miss them all the more.
Daldry
P.S. I’m delighted to hear about your talent for Turkish. Nevertheless, if Can is your only source of information, I’d advise you to invest in a decent dictionary to double-check his lessons . . .
Dear Daldry,
I’ve just come home from the restaurant and am writing to you in the middle of the night. I doubt whether I’ll get any sleep because I’ve had some rather disturbing news today.
Like every morning, Can came to walk me down the hill to the Bosporus. One of the konaks in the neighborhood caught on fire in the middle of the night, and the collapsed remains of the house had blocked off the street we usually take. The nearby streets were jammed with traffic, so we ended up making a broad detour.
I know I’ve already told you about how smells immediately call up old memories for me. As we were walking past a gate covered with climbing roses, I stopped in my tracks. The smell was oddly familiar, a mix of linden and wild roses. We went through the gate, and at the end of a passage we saw an old house. There was an elderly man pottering around in the garden. I recognized the smell of the roses, the gravel, the chalky old walls, and the old stone bench under the branches of a spreading linden tree. Suddenly, it all came back to me: I had known this courtyard when it was full of children, and I recognized the blue door at the top of a little flight of steps. A series of images came flooding back as though out of a dream.
The old man came over to us and asked what we were looking for. I asked him if the building had once been a school, and he confirmed that indeed it had been a small school a long time ago, but now he lived there alone. At the beginning of the century, his father was the schoolmaster and he was one of the teachers. The school closed after the revolution in 1923 and never reopened. He put on his glasses and gave me a closer look, one so intense that it made me uncomfortable at first. Then he said, “I recognize you. You’re little Anouche!” At first I thought he wasn’t right in the head, but I remembered we initially felt the same way when we met Mr. Zemirli, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt and told him that my name was Alice.
He claimed to remember me well and said he’d never forget the “lost look” that I’d always had. He invited us to have some tea. We had barely settled into our seats when he took my hand in his and told me how sorry he was about my parents.
I immediately wondered how he could possibly know about my parents dying during the war, and when I asked him to explain, I could see something was amiss. He said that my parents couldn’t have escaped to England. He continued, saying that his father had known my father and that the violence of the young generation at the time had been a great tragedy. He said that they never knew what had happened to my mother, that I wasn’t the only one who had been in danger, that the authorities would later close the school so that people would forget.
None of it made any sense, but he seemed so sincere and convinced of what he was saying that I didn’t argue.
He said that I had been a studious, intelligent child, but that I refused to talk and that it worried my mother to no end. He talked about how much I looked like my mother, and how when he first saw me just now, he thought he was seeing her, before he realized it had been too long, that it was impossible. He remembered her bringing me to my first day of school, so happy that I was able to study at last. He said his father was the only schoolmaster who would accept me into his class. The other schools didn’t want a child who wouldn’t talk.
I started asking more questions. I asked how he could possibly think that my mother and my father had not died together, explaining that I myself had seen the house we all lived in destroyed by a bomb.
He looked very sorry for me, and then he started talking about my nanny, who, until recently, he used to run into when he did his shopping in Üsküdar. He said that he hadn’t seen her in a while and thought perhaps she had died.
When I told him that I’d never had a nanny of any sort, he asked if I didn’t remember Mrs. Yilmaz.
He told me how much Mrs. Yilmaz had loved me, how much I owed to Mrs. Yilmaz.
My inability to remember those lost years in Istanbul frustrates me no end, so you can imagine how much worse that frustration became when the old schoolteacher began telling me stories from my past and calling me “Anouche.”
He showed us around his house, including the room that had once been the classroom where I studied. It’s a little reading room now. He asked what I had become, whether I was married and whether I had any children. I told him about how I make perfumes, and he didn’t seem surprised at all. He even said he remembered that, unlike other small children, who usually taste strange objects, I was more likely to smell them, and that I did so with remarkable care.
When our visit was over, he accompanied us to the gate, and as I passed the old linden tree and brushed against its leaves, I was certain once again that this was not the first time I had been in that place.
Can thinks that I probably went to school there, and that the old teacher just doesn’t remember everything clearly, that perhaps he remembered me and then confused his memories with those of other children. He thinks other details may come back to me, and that I should trust destiny to reveal them. After all, if that konak hadn’t burned down in the night, we would have never walked past the old school. Even though I know he was only trying to calm me down, he’s probably not entirely wrong . . .
So, as you can understand, there are a lot of questions buzzing around in my head. Why did the old man call me Anouche? What violence was he talking about? Why does he think that my parents died separately when I know they died together? He seemed so sure of himself, so sad to see that I didn’t understand.
I apologize for writing to you in such a state, but I can’t get over it.
Tomorrow, I’ll go back to Cihangir. After all, I know the essentials. I lived here for two years, and for one reason or another, my parents sent me to a local school in Üsküdar, on the other side of the Bosporus, perhaps in the company of a nanny named Mrs. Yilmaz.
I hope that all is well in London, that you keep making progress on your painting, and that you continue to be satisfied with your new studio. To make your work easier, you should know that the house where I
live has four floors and is pale pink with white shutters.
Yours truly,
Alice
P.S. Excuse me for mixing you up with Anton—my mind was elsewhere when I wrote my last letter. Anton is an old friend I sometimes write to as well. Speaking of friends, did you enjoy your trip to the movies with Carol?
Dear Alice,
(Although, I must admit, Anouche is a very pretty name.)
I’m sure that the old teacher must have just confused you with another girl who went to his school. You shouldn’t torture yourself with the memories of a man who may not have all his wits about him.
The good news is that you found the school you attended during the two years you spent as a child in Istanbul. Even in difficult times, your parents saw to it that you got an education, and that’s the important part.
I’ve given it a great deal of thought, and I believe there’s a logical explanation for everything: during the war, and while they were in such a delicate situation (particularly considering the medical aid they were giving the people in Beyoğlu, which wasn’t without its dangers), it seems likely that your parents preferred you go to school in a different neighborhood. And if they were both working at the university, it seems logical that they needed a nanny’s help, which also explains why Mr. Zemirli didn’t remember you. When he came to get his medicine, you must have been at school or in the care of Mrs. Yilmaz. With the mystery solved, you can return to your work, which I hope is advancing by leaps and bounds.
My own work is moving forward, not as quickly as I would like, but I think I’m doing fairly well. At least that’s what I tell myself when I leave your flat every evening. I think otherwise when I return the next morning. What can I say? It’s not easy being a painter—ours is a business of illusion and disillusion. One day you think you’ve mastered your subject, but the damned brushes often seem to have a mind of their own. They’re not the only ones . . .