by Marc Levy
“Mama Can, I never intended to seduce your nephew.”
“I realize that, but I’m talking about him, not you. He would search all of Istanbul if you asked him to. Don’t you see that?”
“I’m sorry. I never thought that—
“I know. You work so much that you don’t have a minute to think about anything. Why do you think I forbid you from working on Sundays? So that you rest at least one day a week. So that your heart has a reason to keep on beating. But I can see that you’re not attracted to Can. You should leave him in peace. You know the way to Cihangir, and the weather is warm and pleasant now. You can go there on your own.”
“I’ll talk to him about it tomorrow.”
“You don’t need to discuss it. You just have to tell him you don’t require his services any longer. If he really is the best guide in the city, he’ll be able to find other customers.”
Alice looked into Mama Can’s eyes. “You don’t want me to work here anymore?”
“I never said anything like that. What’s got into your head? I like you very much, and so do the customers. I’m delighted to see you arrive every evening. I’d be bored without you. Keep up your work, keep the room where you sleep so well, concentrate on your days in Cihangir, and everything will be for the better.”
“I understand, Mama Can. I’ll think about it.” Alice took off her apron, folded it, and put it on the table.
“Why were you angry with your husband last night?” she asked as she headed for the door.
“Because I’m like you, dear. I’m strong-willed and I ask too many questions. See you tomorrow. Go on. I’ll close up behind you.”
Can was waiting for Alice outside.
“You don’t look well. Are things still tense in the restaurant?” asked Can.
“No, everything is back to normal.”
“Mama Can’s bad moods never last long. Come on, I’ll take you home.”
They started off toward Alice’s apartment.
“I have to talk to you about something, Can.”
“I have news too. I think it’s better if you hear about it now. The reason the old schoolteacher doesn’t see Mrs. Yilmaz in the market anymore is that she left Istanbul. She went home to Izmit with her family. I even have her address.”
“Is that far? When can we go and see her?”
“It’s about an hour on the train. We could also take a boat. I haven’t arranged anything yet. I wanted to make sure you were ready.”
“Of course I am. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I don’t know. Maybe my aunt is right when she says that it’s better not to go digging in the past. What’s the point if you’re already happy? Maybe it’s better to look ahead and think of the future.”
“I’m not afraid of the past. Besides, we all need to know where we come from, don’t we? I can’t stop wondering why my parents didn’t tell me about the beginning of my life. Wouldn’t you want to know the same things if you were in my place?”
“Maybe they had a good reason to say nothing. Maybe they were trying to protect you.”
“Trying to protect me from what?”
“From painful memories?”
“I was five years old. I don’t have any memories from that time, and I don’t think anything could be worse than the ignorance—the emptiness—I feel now. If I knew the truth, whatever it is, I might at least understand why I remember nothing.”
“I suppose that the trip to Gibraltar in the cargo ship must have been difficult. Your parents were probably just glad you didn’t remember.”
“I suppose so too, but until I have confirmation one way or the other, it’s all speculation. But more than that, I just want to hear somebody talk to me about them. I’d be happy to have any memory, even the dullest, most ordinary things—how my mother dressed, what she said in the morning when I left for school, what our life was like in that apartment, what we did on Sundays. It would be a way to reconnect with them, even if only for the length of a conversation. It’s difficult to mourn somebody’s death when you didn’t have the chance to say goodbye. I miss them as much today as I did during the first days after I lost them.”
“Instead of going to Cihangir tomorrow, I’ll take you to Mrs. Yilmaz, but you can’t speak a word of it to my aunt. Do you promise?” They had arrived at the foot of the steps to Alice’s house.
Alice considered Can’s imploring face for a moment. “Do you have somebody in your life?”
“I have a lot of people in my life, Miss Alice. Friends and a very big family too. Almost too big for my taste.”
“I mean somebody special, somebody that you like.”
“The pretty girls of Üsküdar pass through my heart every day. It costs nothing and offends nobody to love in silence. And you, do you love somebody?”
“I’m the one who asked first.”
“What has my aunt been telling you? She would make up anything to stop me working for you and helping you with your search. She is so stubborn when she gets an idea in her head that she would say I was going to ask you to marry me. I reassure you, this is not my intention.”
Alice took Can’s hand in hers.
“I promise you, I didn’t believe her for a second.”
Can pulled his hand from hers. “Don’t do that,” he said in a broken voice.
“It was just a show of friendship.”
“Perhaps, but friendship is never entirely innocent between a man and a woman.”
“I don’t agree. My best and closest friend is a man, and we’ve been friends since we were in our teens.”
“You don’t miss him?”
“Of course I miss him. I write to him every week.”
“Does he write back?”
“No, but he has a good excuse. I don’t actually send my letters.”
Can smiled and left Alice on her doorstep, walking backward to keep looking at her as he went. “And you never asked yourself why you don’t send them?”
Dear Daldry,
I think I’ve come to the end of my journey, and yet, if I’m writing to you this evening, it’s to tell you that I won’t be coming home soon, or at least, not for a very long time. When you read the rest of this letter, you’ll understand why.
Yesterday morning, I was reunited with Mrs. Yilmaz, the nanny who took care of me as a little girl. Can took me to see her. She lives in a house at the top of a little street that was just a dirt path until recently. And at the end of that little street, I found a long flight of steps . . .
As they did every day, Alice and Can left Üsküdar early in the morning, but as Can had promised, they went to the Haydarpaşa railway station. Their train left at nine thirty. As she watched the landscape speed past the window, Alice wondered what her nanny looked like and whether the sight of her would stir up old memories. When they arrived in Izmit an hour later, they took a taxi that drove them to the top of a hill in the oldest part of the city.
Mrs. Yilmaz’s dilapidated old house had been around for quite a bit longer than she had. The strange wooden structure leaned precariously to one side and seemed as though it might tip over and collapse at any moment. The wood siding was barely held in place by nails, whose heads had long ago rusted away, and the windows were so eroded by the salt and warped from the freezes and thaws of many winters that they rattled in their frames with even the slightest breeze. Alice and Can knocked on the door. A man whom Alice took for Mrs. Yilmaz’s son answered and had them come into the sitting room, where Alice was struck by the odor of pine resin that came from the wood smoking in the fireplace, the sour-milk smell of musty books, a carpet that had the gentle, dry fragrance of earth, and a pair of old leather boots that still carried a scent of rain.
“She’s up there,” said the man, pointing upstairs. “I didn’t tell her anything, just that somebody would be coming to visit.”
As she climbed the creaky old stairs, Alice noticed the linen-closet perfume of lavender, the tang of the linseed oil that had been used to polish
the banister, the starched, floury-smelling sheets, and the lonely smell of mothballs.
Mrs. Yilmaz was reading in bed. She slid her glasses to the tip of her nose to better see the couple that had come to visit.
She stared at Alice as she approached, holding her breath before exhaling a long, heavy sigh of relief. Her eyes filled with tears.
Alice, on the other hand, saw only a stranger, an old woman she had never seen before. Until Mrs. Yilmaz beckoned her over, took her in her arms, and clutched Alice to her breast, weeping . . .
. . . As she hugged me, I smelled the essence of my childhood, the odors of the past, of the kisses I received before going to bed. I heard the sounds of the curtains being opened in my childhood bedroom and my nanny’s voice saying, “Anouche, get up, there’s a beautiful boat in the harbor, come and see.”
I remembered the smell of warm milk in the kitchen. I saw the feet of the cherrywood table that I loved to hide beneath. I heard the stairs creak under my father’s footsteps, and I saw an Indian-ink drawing of two faces I had forgotten.
I have two mothers and two fathers, and now all four of them are gone.
It took Mrs. Yilmaz a while to dry her tears. She kept stroking my cheek and kissing my face, murmuring my name: “Anouche, Anouche, my little Anouche, my sunshine, you came back to see your old nanny.” I started crying too. I couldn’t help myself. I cried for all of my ignorance as I gradually learned the story of the people who brought me into the world and never saw me grow up. I found out that the parents I loved, who had raised me as their own, had adopted me to save my life. My name isn’t Alice, but Anouche, and before becoming English I was Armenian. My real name isn’t Pendelbury.
When I was five, I was a mute little girl who had learned to talk and then stopped. Nobody knew exactly why. My world was one of odors; in a sense, they were an alternate language. My father was a cobbler by trade. He had built up a business and owned a large workshop and two stores, one on either side of the Bosporus. Mrs. Yilmaz says he was considered the best shoemaker in Istanbul. People came to his shops from all parts of the city. My father ran the store in Pera and my mother ran the store in Kadiköy. Every morning Mrs. Yilmaz took me to the little school in Üsküdar. My parents worked hard, but on Sundays my father always took us out for a carriage ride.
At the beginning of 1914, a doctor suggested to my parents that there might be a cure for my silence, that certain medicinal plants might calm my violent nightmares, and that normal sleep patterns might help my ability to speak to return. One of my father’s clients was a young English pharmacist who often helped families who could find no other solution. So every week, Mrs. Yilmaz and I went to Istiklal to see him.
It seems that whenever I saw the pharmacist’s wife, I would call out her name.
Mr. Pendelbury’s concoctions had a miraculous effect. After six months of treatment, I was sleeping normally and started speaking again with increasing fluency. Life was good. Then came the fateful day of April 25, 1915.
On that day, the elite of Istanbul’s Armenian population—intellectuals, journalists, doctors, teachers, and shopkeepers—were all rounded up and arrested in a bloody pogrom. Most of the men were shot without trial, and those who were spared were deported to Adana and Aleppo.
At the end of the afternoon, word of the massacres reached my father’s workshop. Our Turkish friends had come to warn us and hide us as quickly as they could. The Armenian community had been accused by some of conspiring with the Russians, one of Turkey’s enemies at the time. None of it was true, but nationalist sentiments had got people fired up, and in spite of many Istanbul natives speaking out against it, the violence continued unfettered.
My father had tried to join us, but along the way, he ran into a mob that was hunting Armenians.
“Your father was a good man,” Mrs. Yilmaz kept telling me. They caught him near the port. When they were done, they left him for dead. But he got up again. In spite of his wounds, he kept walking and found a way to make it across the water to Kadiköy, which the violence hadn’t yet reached.
“We saw him come home in the middle of the night, covered in blood; his face was so dreadfully swollen that we hardly recognized him. He went to see you in your bedroom, where you were sleeping, and begged your mother to stop crying so that you wouldn’t wake up. Then he took us to the sitting room and explained what was happening in the city—the murders, the burning houses, the rapes . . . All of the horror men are capable of when they lose their humanity. He said we had to protect the children at all costs. We were to leave the city at once, to hook up a carriage and head into the countryside, where the situation might be calmer. He begged me to hide you with my family, here in this house in Izmit where you had stayed before. Your mother couldn’t stop crying and she asked him why he talked as though he wouldn’t be coming along. I still remember how your father said, ‘I’m going to sit down and rest awhile, I’m a bit tired.’ He was such a proud man, the kind of man who made you feel like you had to keep your back straight in his presence. He sat down and closed his eyes. Your mother fell to her knees and embraced him. He put his hand on her cheek, smiled, and sighed. His head fell to the side and he never said anything again. He died with a smile on his face, looking at your mother, just as he had always wanted.
“I still remember once when your parents quarreled, your father saying, ‘You know, Mrs. Yilmaz, she’s angry because we work too much, but when we’re old, I’ll buy her a beautiful villa in the country with lots of land all around, and she’ll be the happiest woman on earth. And when I die in that big house, the fruit of our labor, when that day comes, the last thing I want to see is my wife looking back at me.’ I remember him saying it very loudly so that your mother would hear. She let a few minutes pass, and when he put on his coat, she came to the door and told him, ‘First of all, there is no way of knowing that you’ll be the first one to die, and second of all, the day that I die, exhausted from your cursed ambitions, the last thing I’ll see in the delirium of my death throes will be a pile of damned shoes.’ She hugged him and sent him on his way, saying he was the hardest-working man in the city, and that she wouldn’t have wanted anyone else for her husband.
“We moved his body to the bed, and your mother tucked him in as though he were only sleeping. She kissed him and whispered a few words in his ear before telling me to go wake you. We left as your father had told us to do. As I was hooking up the carriage, your mother packed a few things. One of the things she took was the drawing in the frame on my dresser between the windows.”
I went over and picked up the drawing. I didn’t recognize their faces, but the man and the woman smiling back at me were my parents.
“We drove the horses through the night, and as the sun was rising, we arrived in Izmit, where we were welcomed by my family. Your mother was inconsolable. Most days she sat underneath the big linden tree in the garden. On good days, she took you out into the fields to pick bouquets of roses and jasmine. Along the way, you told her all of the different things you could smell.
“We thought we were safe, that the murderous insanity had been contained, and that what had happened in Istanbul would be limited to the one bloody night that took your father. We were wrong. Hatred spread through the country, and in June my nephew came running up the hill, out of breath, to tell us they had started arresting Armenians in the lower neighborhoods of Izmit. They rounded them up like animals and herded them to the train station, where they were loaded into goods vans.
“I had a sister that lived in a big house on the Bosporus. That lucky girl was so beautiful that she managed to marry a rich and important man, the sort of man who is so powerful that other people never dare to come to his house unless they are invited. Thankfully, both she and her husband had hearts of gold. They would have never let anyone harm a hair on the head of a woman or her children. As a family, we decided you would take refuge with them, and that your mother and I would take you there. At ten in the evening—I remember it as though
it were yesterday—we took your little black suitcase and ventured out into the darkened streets of Izmit. From the top of the steps at the end of our street, we could see the fires burning in the city below. They were the houses of the Armenians who lived near the port. We took to the alleys, trying to avoid patrols out hunting for new victims. We hid for a while in the ruins of an old church. Stupidly, we thought the worst had passed, so we went back outside. Your mother was holding you by the hand. And then, at the end of the street, we saw the patrol.”
Mrs. Yilmaz went silent. She began crying, so I took her in my arms and tried to comfort her. She took her handkerchief, wiped her face, and kept telling her horrible story.
“You have to forgive me, Anouche. I know more than thirty years have passed, but I still can’t talk about it without crying. It all happened so fast. Your mother knelt on the ground before you. She told you that you were her little wonder, her life, that you had to survive, no matter the cost. No matter what happened, she would watch over you, she would be in your heart, wherever you went. She said that she had to leave, but that she would never leave your heart. She pushed us into the shadow of a stable. She kissed us and begged me to protect you. Then she stepped out alone into the night to meet the patrol of barbarians. So that they would not come farther and see us, she went to them.
“They took her away. As they did, I led you down the hill on the old footpaths I had always known. My cousin was waiting for us in a boat. We set out across the water and traveled through the night. Well before dawn, we pulled up on the bank and walked again until we came to my sister’s house.”
I asked Mrs. Yilmaz what had happened to my mother.
“We never heard anything more from her. In Izmit alone, four thousand Armenians were deported, and across the Empire, during that horrible summer, they assassinated hundreds of thousands of people. Today, nobody mentions it; everybody keeps silent. Only a very few survived, and even fewer find the strength to talk about it. Nobody wants to listen—it takes too much courage and humility to ask for forgiveness. Some people talk about the ‘displaced populations,’ but it was much worse than that, believe me. I have heard from some people that they formed lines of men, women, and children many miles long, that they were forced to walk across the country to the south. Those who were not put in trains had to walk along the tracks without food or water, only to be shot and thrown in a hole when they couldn’t walk anymore. The survivors were taken into the middle of the desert, where they were left to die of exhaustion, hunger, and thirst. “When I looked after you at my sister’s house that summer, I wasn’t aware of any of that, though I suspected the worst. When I saw your mother walk toward those men, I knew we would probably never see her again. I was very afraid for you. The next morning, you stopped talking again. A month later, when my sister and her husband had made sure that things were less violent in Istanbul, I took you to the pharmacist in Istiklal. When you saw his wife, you smiled again and ran to give her a hug. I told them about what had happened to your family.