Many and Many a Year Ago (11 page)

“As for his brother Maxim, whatever you've heard about him is a lie, except for the fact that he went to America alone. He took the Fabergé jewelry they'd smuggled out of Russia to New York with him. There he sold it all and put Vlad's share in the Bank of New York. The count had a London account too. He never had financial problems. Maxim taught Russian at several second-rate universities and sometimes worked as a museum consultant. He married three times, I believe, but never had children. We received the news of his death in 1980 just as the 12 September coup was declared.

“What
is
correct in the accounts you heard is the reason why Vlad Baba stayed in Istanbul and lived in Balat. Yes: it was to be close to Zoe Zervudaki, who looked much like Virginia Woolf. The person most irritated by the pretentious but mysterious Zoe was my mother. It was no secret to anyone in the Fener–Balat district that Zoe would keep the count in reserve as long as her paralyzed husband was alive. I myself saw how this honorable behavior only caused his respect for the hoarse-voiced Zoe to grow. Her husband Nico Zervudaki, however, was unhappy with the situation. Rumor had it that the Byzantine historian repeatedly urged his wife, who was his former student, to ‘put me in the Balikli Greek Hospital for good and then let's get a divorce.' It was Vlad who looked after Professor Zervudaki when Zoe died. Today all three of them lie side by side in the Greek Orthodox Cemetery at Şişli.

“The month I started university my mother had a stroke and died. I knew very well that the count, whose house I'd moved into, was a hard-core anti-communist. In fact he confessed to me, when I was telling him the reason for my expulsion from school, that he was an Anglo-American spy. I sought help from my stuttering cousin Bayram, an organizer and the main reason for my involvement in the leftist movement. It blew his mind when I told him I wanted to escape to Moscow to be near Nazım Hikmet. My intention was to sneak into the U.S.S.R. from the Georgian border, stopping off on the way to say goodbye to Hasan and Halit.

“If you were to ask about my romantic adventures before the age of twenty-one … well, I made the count laugh once when I complained about the freckled girl in grade school who wrote a poem for me. I never went to movies or read romantic novels. I believed that the real theme of Nazım Hikmet's love poetry was freedom. I learned from the stuttering Bayram to open my heart to no other love than the communist ideal.

“When I looked into Nalan's eyes at the Mahmudiye ranch I was speechless. Petrified. It felt like water, fire, and air were all mingling in my soul at the same time as an earthquake was erupting. My whole past unrolled before my eyes like a blank film. At that moment I decided that she was the woman of my life. I didn't know who she was, nor was I even curious about her name. It never occurred to me that to reach out to her was an impossible fantasy. I saw the invitation in her green eyes and I thought my heart would stop. We took two days to get acquainted, and two weeks to decide to marry, come what may.

“As soon as I sent that panicked telegram to the count I was overcome with regret. I knew, really, that if I went to Halit for help I wouldn't be refused. His father, who had had to accept his own arranged marriage, was impressed by my boldness in eloping with a factory owner's daughter whom I'd known for just two weeks. I never forgot how generously he gave us the money to see us through those two years. But in Tirebolu I felt queasy when I divined the riddle of Halit's insinuating glances. Actually, when we were freshmen at university I sensed a sort of strangeness about him. Besides his clinging ways, he would sniff my underwear and roll around in my bed. I wouldn't have shared a house with him any longer even if we hadn't been kicked out of school. The person who spilled his guts at the police station was Hasan, not me. It was while I was saying goodbye to Halit for good that I decided to assume the role of stool pigeon. I preferred being a surprise traitor in his memory to being the subject of his erotic fantasies.

“Nalan and I managed to get from Trabzon to Ankara. We married as soon as I changed my last name. She became a student of Turkish literature at Ankara University, and I entered the French department. In the fall of 1957, when our son was born, my mother-in-law relented and we began to visit the family again. My father-in-law supported us financially until we finished school. When Yusuf was two years old, however, my wife came down with chronic bronchitis. It was clear that to prevent her lungs from collapsing she would have to live and work where the air was better. As it happened, on the very day we were appointed to teach at a high school in oxygen-rich Ayvalık, her father died. We paid our debt to Halit's father—with interest—with Nalan's inheritance, and put the remainder in the bank for Yusuf's education.

“My wife was a proud, reserved woman. She always had her head in a book. I took great care not to hurt her. Yusuf was four before she realized that I'd named our son after Joseph Stalin—which was the first time I saw her angry with me. Yusuf greatly resembled his mother. They were very close. Yusuf went off to England to study. But he fell into the clutches of a so-called neo-Islamic group, and he fell in love with a German girl three years older than himself. Despite his mother's opposition he married Magda, who converted to Islam and took the name Miriam—Meryem in Turkish. He didn't visit us that year. On the night of 31 December 1981, their daughter Sim was born. Her name means ‘silver' in Persian. Six weeks later Yusuf came home with his child in his arms and strands of gray in his hair. His tired face reminded me of my father's just before he set out on his last voyage. He handed the baby to her grandmother and collapsed in wild heartbroken sobs: a traffic accident had killed his wife. When he finally regained his breath and launched into a half-English, half-Arabic exhortation, I doubted his sanity. He drank a glass of water and left the house and I never saw him again. He called at odd times and talked to his mother, and apparently told her that he was working in America for some sort of scientific organization. He said he would come back to Ayvalık when he had pulled himself together. After that his calls fell off to once a year or so, and when he did call he never spoke to his daughter. The truth is, my wife never really gave me the opportunity to get close to my son. I haven't heard from him since she died.

“I knew Nalan would never recover. She took early retirement to raise Sim. The closer she became to her grandchild, the further she pushed me away. Back then I didn't suppose that she was aware of my little romantic escapades, or that they would make any difference to her if she was.

“Vlad and I made peace with each other after Yusuf was born. During his sixty-eight years in Turkey he rarely left Istanbul. He said, when he came to Ayvalık for the first time, ‘I've been nowhere but Ankara, and I thought I would die without seeing the Aegean.' He lived to be ninety-five and saw the breakup of the Soviet empire before he died. Since I'd always taken the daily struggle to make ends meet as a desirable thing, I have very little sense of money. It surprised people, naturally, when I refused to get excited about inheriting $1.3 million. When the money went into my account Nalan said, without looking me in the eye, ‘Haluk, why don't we move to a place where men don't chase after easy women?' I was ashamed to the core.

“My wife loved this olive grove. She brought workmen from Mount Ida and had this abandoned stone house rebuilt almost from scratch. I retired at fifty-five so that we could move here. Nalan was the caretaker of 1,200 trees on two adjacent plots of land. Some of them she gave names to, and she would carry on conversations with them. When Sim went off to high school in Ä°zmir, Nalan took to looking after the trees individually. Me, I never could feel close to any of these thankless plants … each one a unique study in ugliness … posed like a tragic sculpture … calling down incurable diseases … Olives demand constant attention, you know. They bear fruit only every other year, and the profit margins are slim. Under the terms of my wife's will I can't sell the olive groves; but I leave the job of tending them to sharecroppers.

“Sim made her decision to become a painter when she was only ten. Her grandmother always said, ‘That girl was a color fanatic from the day she took her first step.' She never missed an exhibition. She collected art books. She always had her nose in painters' biographies. During her childhood we took her to see every major art museum in Europe. It didn't bother me when her grandmother said, ‘Even this girl's sweat smells like paint.' It was as if her passion had developed into a philosophical position. With her professors' support she decided on an academic career. Then, in the second year of her doctoral studies, she had a traffic accident and completely lost her eyesight. Nalan's joy of life withered away after that and she stopped taking her medication. The following year she passed away. I buried my angelic wife in the village cemetery up the hill and dug a grave for me beside her. The best compliment I've had in the last six months was to be called a dead man walking.

“Sim's portrait—the one you see behind me—was painted by a lady named Banu, whom Sim used to visit often in her studio. They say it's not impossible that my grandchild could see again if she could just find the will to recover. After her grandmother died she gave herself over to music. Whenever she's not playing the
ney
, she's dozing off in the middle of listening to melancholy compositions.

“I think, now that you've heard about the ‘three H's', you'll agree that the saddest story is the leader's. You must understand that you've been the target of an elaborate and expensive practical joke. Vlad always kept the telegram I sent him from Mahmudiye in his diary. I imagine some idiot got his hands on that thick notebook and used a few things he found in it to send you on a fool's tour of Anatolia.”

“One minute, sir,” I said. I fished out Stuart Fugato's card and dialed the “Available 24 Hours A Day” number. A metallic female voice scolded me three times in English: “The number you have dialled is not in service. Please hang up and try again.”

With the calm of someone who knows he's right, Haluk said, “Don't be discouraged, Kemal. There's a rule at play here: a practical joker lies low for a while, and then will come to the surface if you don't find him. In fact, tracking me down like you did wasn't a bad piece of detective work …”

As I retraced my steps through the olive grove I struggled not with the question “Who?” but “Why?” I walked faster so that the hunchbacked trees couldn't sneak up behind me shouting, “Idiot! Idiot!” And all the while I couldn't remove the image of Sim from my mind.

I slunk back to Istanbul feeling like a marathon winner whose medal has been revoked. I was too tired even to grumble at the burned-out driver of the taxi I grabbed at the bus station. We pulled into the Balat neighborhood with me slumped down on the tattered back seat. It was the first time I'd ever run up my stairs. I didn't treat myself to a hot shower, I didn't even feel like listening to Bach. I felt more like an exile than someone coming home. I thought my right hand would distract me by starting to shake, but it didn't. I took two sleeping pills and went to bed as the late afternoon
ezan
rose up from the 3,000 mosques.

It was midnight when I stirred sluggishly and pulled myself out of bed. I ate the last two candy bars in the fridge, then put on and took off my shoes twice, choosing not to go to Disco Eden in the end. Professor Ali must be up translating Madeleine Bourdouxhe's
Marie
, I thought. At the risk of being turned away, I knocked on his door, thinking I might feel better if I told him what I'd been through. He finally opened the door and for the first time I saw him unshaven. I suspected he'd been watching a documentary on great white sharks.

“I've been expecting you,” he said.

I launched into a passionate diatribe, but his interest seemed gradually to fade, to my surprise. He sensed my uncertainty.

“You accomplished more than I thought you would,” he said. “But not every story you play a part in is going to have a prosaic ending. Don't you think that as a classical music fan you should react more calmly to surprise developments? Besides, the last act of this drama may be still to come …”

He looked satisfied to see that I was more confused. Putting a glass of wine in my hand, he said, “I have things to tell you too, Kemal. While you were gone my sister Oya passed away. I thought of you as I was burying her at Z. She left the Maçka apartment and enough money to rescue me from teaching snobbish rich kids. When the university closes in two weeks for summer vacation I'll be on my way to the States. And you're coming with me! We'll be hitting the New York-San Francisco-Santa Fe-Juneau circuit.”

Stunned, I was still shaping a refusal when he went on.

“I know you don't exactly deserve a prize. But it would be painful for me to be alone on a trip like this, so you'll be my traveling companion.”

Two days later I saw him as he was leaving the building. His face was such a mask I didn't approach him. I decided to wait for him to call after he got over whatever it was was troubling him. I attended the Istanbul Classical Music Festival, hopping from venue to venue with my eighty-year-old friends. On the day I renewed my passport he invited me to dinner. He looked considerably more relaxed. Luckily I didn't ask him why we were having Argentinean wine with our rocket salad, artichokes in olive oil, risotto with mushrooms, and profiterole with ice cream. When he rose and turned down Nat King Cole, I expected an announcement. He came back with an envelope. The piece of paper that fell out of it read:

TO FIND ESTHER:

CALLE 3 DE FEBRERO, NO. 2035-B

BELGRANO

“For four days I've been grappling with the riddle that came out of this envelope,” he said. “It was mailed from Taksim with no return address. Once I found out from the Internet that Manuel Belgrano was an eighteenth-century Argentinean national hero, I bought a guide to Buenos Aires. There I discovered that Belgrano is also a neighborhood favored by wealthy Jews. Esther always kept her address and phone number to herself. But the address on this piece of paper might refer only to her first address there. I can't check with our friend Luna because after her husband died she moved to Israel and lost touch with everybody. I commissioned one of my former students from Ä°zmir to do a little investigation, but he came up empty-handed as well. The Ardittis and Venturas apparently either died off or have been scattered throughout the world. But one of Eli's close friends, a bridge teacher, said that she'd heard nothing about Esther dying in the accident.