Many and Many a Year Ago (13 page)

The 1992 Citroen in which we immediately hit the streets was the youngest vehicle I'd seen there. The deserted districts on the Retiro-Belgrano axis seemed about to go into hibernation. Even though the rows of photogenic
gomero
trees, which I'd never seen before, were doing a slow striptease, they hardly spoiled the sorrow-laden panorama of the city. Once upon a time old and wealthy Jews used to live in quiet Belgrano.

“I'll be testing the advantages of my religion in this job, looking for my fellow Jews from Turkey,” said my guide, himself a Hungarian Jew.

Ariel hesitantly entrusted the Citroen to a car park on February the Third Avenue, but I couldn't get him to tell me the significance of the street's name. I didn't feel estranged by the surroundings. For me the architectural chaos created by heaps of apartment buildings besieging the calm streets was normal. After all, when property owners plucked from various European subcultures exercise their taste in architecture, the result will naturally be a mosaic of gaudiness.

The handsomest building on the street might have been 2035B, before which I stood somewhat quizzically. I could have sworn that I'd seen its dirty white façade in Ä°zmir, on the Kordon. I stepped back cautiously as Ariel rang the bell marked “Encargado.” First we heard a girl's high-pitched voice, then the weary one of a man, emanating from the intercom. I was feeling fatigued as my guide spoke slowly and distinctly to them. Finally the concierge, who appeared to be in his fifties, climbed the steps from the basement. I was embarrassed to see Ariel tucking a fifty-peso note into the recalcitrant man's shirt pocket. I left them talking at the door and went out to the street. I was deciding which direction I should take to find the ugliest façade in the district when Ariel emerged with a smile on his face.

I was expecting an apology for keeping me waiting but none was offered. Tintin managed the situation with simplicity: “We're lucky. In Buenos Aires the job of concierge, like lighthouse-keeping, is passed from father to son. Forty years ago, when the Ardittis moved to the seventh floor here, the concierge was Juan Gomez's father. And five years later, when Esther was packing up to move to another part of town, it was Gomez who looked after baby Stella. Nobody from that period remains in the building, and no one has seen the Ardittis since then. The talkative Gomez also tells us that Eli, said to be a husband better looking than the wife, was Izak Roditi's relative. This is an important clue.

“Roditi was a man of prominence in Argentina's Jewish community, and today might well be the richest businessman in South America. Last month the newspaper
Clarin
ran an interview with him in honor of his eightieth birthday. If it's true that he feels a special affinity for Jews of Turkish origin, why shouldn't we be able to meet with him?”

As we passed the Museo Hombre on the way back to the car park, Professor Ali's Esther speech came to mind. Izak Roditi must have been the cousin with whom Eli broke off relations after he came to town. Therefore, even if we made it into Roditi's august presence, I wasn't sure he would give us the time of day. So as not to demotivate Ariel, however, I didn't mention the Roditi-Arditti conflict to him. We climbed into the car after opening the door on the fourth try, and I consoled myself with the thought that at least the address which came out of the mysterious envelope was real.

On that late winter afternoon, the city traffic that I'd earlier found as calm as that of Eskişehir was now more like that of Istanbul. But on witnessing the furious drivers of the World War II relics used as city buses here, I understood that I'd been unfair to Istanbul's bus drivers. At the hotel we got stuck for nearly half an hour, with a quartet of tourists, in its pernicious revolving door. As I stood behind an old couple locked hand in hand, a strategy for finding out who had sent the Belgrano address suddenly came to me.

We were supposed to meet Ariel in the lobby two hours later and go to a local club. I impressed my guide by suggesting we abandon the idea of going to a dance show if there were none better than the Tango Passion, which I'd seen in Istanbul. In the elevator a wave of sleepiness came over me, reminding me of the six-hour time difference between Argentina and Turkey. I was eager to present my first report to Professor Ali, but when I got to his door I didn't have the heart to knock. I retired to my room and put on Adriana Verala and tried to remember who it was that I'd compared the girl on the plane to. I knew I'd be sound asleep by the time the woman with the face of Buenos Aires was crying, “Mano á Mano.”

I felt an irrational craving for a kebab at the Club del Vino, even as I was eating a steak you could cut with a spoon. But after tasting the red wine I felt bitter about Istanbul's imported varieties.

“I have to revisit the memory of my accursed grandfather before I can begin my own story,” were Ariel's promising opening words when I asked him how he had come to be a book dealer in Buenos Aires. “In 1937 the poor and unemployed journalist Israel Gluckman migrated from Warsaw to Buenos Aires with the money his fiancée Aviva had saved. There he moved in with his cousin Saul Rosenfeld, a supervisor at a textile wholesalers. He began giving private religious and language lessons, with the goal of saving enough money to bring his fiancée over from Warsaw at the earliest opportunity. Saul was surprised to see the anarchist Israel, known for his conflicts with his rabbi father, whose teachings he rejected back in Krakow, seeking refuge in the Talmud now that he was abroad. Israel began a flirtation with Sarah, the daughter of the wealthy Moshe Grossman, who owned a chain of kosher restaurants. The news that Israel's fiancée, to whom he had been sending deceitful letters, was among the first victims of the Nazi invasion of Warsaw, seems to have been the opportunity he has been waiting for. On New Year's Eve of 1940 he married Sarah. To appeal to his fundamentalist father-in-law he continued to teach religion and joined the Templo Libertad synagogue. In 1942, an hour after their son was born, Sarah passed away. What would later come to light was how he had forced his wife, who suffered from a rheumatic heart, to go ahead with the delivery despite the risks.

“Their son David was blind in one eye and missing a finger on his right hand. His maternal grandmother took him in, and Israel became lost in dissipation with Gentiles. His Argentinean adventure came to an end, though, when his gambling companions, who had loaned him money, went to his father-in-law to collect. Moshe Grossman gave him enough money to flee to the U.S. in return for custody of his grandson. Israel reached New York on the day after Hitler commited suicide, and the first people to cold-shoulder him were his comrades at the
Jewish Daily Forward
. One of them was said to be Isaac Bashevis Singer, winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize for Literature.

“One day, in the middle of a battle to get a meal on credit at the delicatessen of someone he knew in Warsaw, who should walk into the place but Aviva. After the first moment of shock, he managed to convince his former fiancée to buy him lunch at the nearest cafeteria. Aviva had miraculously survived the first street massacre organized by the Nazis but had lost her entire family. With their neighbor, a close friend of her father, she had managed to escape to Czernowitz, a town in the Ukraine. There Rudi Seinfeld, a widower and the neighbor's cousin, took them in. When things got out of hand there too the three fled together to Southampton, where they took a ship to New York. She now lived in Brooklyn and had a peaceful marriage with old Seinfeld, who had become a timber merchant.

“By the time Aviva finished her tale, Israel had his life story ready: he'd been imprisoned for six years for seriously wounding a Gentile in a fight that broke out when the Gentile insulted the Jewish race. All he could do while he was in prison was think of Aviva. Forty-eight hours after his release, he had been expelled from the country and now he was in New York, penniless, homeless, etc …

“Israel not only managed to charm Aviva once more, but also to get himself taken under Rudi's wing, who was led to believe he was Aviva's childhood friend. He couldn't hold down either of the two jobs Rudi found for him. He neglected the many people from whom he had borrowed money. By the time Aviva caught him with a young Irish immigrant nanny, she'd already heard about his shady career in Buenos Aires. Three months later Israel's body was found in a hotel room. According to police reports, it was suicide by a bullet to the brain, but his homeboys weren't convinced.

“David was the name chosen for the son born prematurely to Aviva two days before the death of Israel, whose last name meant ‘man of luck.' At sixty, Rudi had become a father for the first time. As soon as David began to walk Rudi took his family away; he didn't want people noticing that David, with his green eyes, was growing up to look just like Israel.

“Actually I learned the story of Israel, or Serpiente—the Snake—as he was known, from Saul, who is 103 years old and supposedly the oldest immigrant in Argentina. The rest of it is part of my family's oral history. It was feared for a while that the motherless David would grow up as fragile as his mother and as cunning as his backsliding father. When he finished elementary school David received private tutoring, particularly in English and Yiddish. By the time he'd memorized the Old Testament and the Talmud he was the darling of the family and his grandmother's confidant. After his bar mitzvah his physiological progress came almost to a halt. He stopped going out during the day except for trips to the synagogue. And if he did go out at night without leaving a note nobody dared ask him what he'd been doing.

“David was thirty when his grandmother married him off to the childless Runya Korn. Runya was a lonely Hungarian immigrant seven inches taller and four years older than her husband. Five years after their marriage I was born. We had a spacious house that looked onto my father's favorite synagogue. He was a cold and silent man who spent much of his time in his study. I couldn't understand why he kept telling me to read everything I could and to always love my mother. She was a simple person who was keen on housekeeping and treated my father like a saint. I assumed we were moving when he sold all but 200 of his book collection to a New York dealer. But four months later he died of heart failure, just as we were about to celebrate my ninth birthday. Though she knew how feeble my father's health was, my mother had never prepared herself for this eventuality; and for the last twenty years she's made mourning for him a way of life. Marcel, the youngest of my three uncles, once said to me, ‘David knew that he would never see fifty. The reason you were born was to take care of your mother.'

“Thanks to the economic crises Argentina kept passing in and out of, my great-grandfather lost much of his wealth and had to shut down all but two of his restaurants. When he lost his favorite grandson too, he lost his will to live. Forty days later my eldest aunt would swear that she saw him smiling for the first time when she found him dead in his bed.

“At the reading of the will Marcel and my mother received two apartments and enough money to last a good ten years; the other uncles divided the money equally and got the two restaurants. Marcel is a bachelor and teaches chemistry at Buenos Aires University. Under his watchful eye, I completed my education at the same institution, in the Department of English Literature, where I was an honors student. My father had entrusted the money from the sale of his library to my uncle for my education.”

He paused.

“And now you'll see why I could not avoid becoming the bibliophile that he intended me to become all along.”

Draining his wine glass, he scanned the room before removing his glasses. His face looked like a tragic mask cobbled together by an amateur shaman. The leafy-green eyes two sizes too big for his face were like snake's eyes. He put his glasses back on, sighing with the relief of completing an onerous task, and ordered more wine.

“After primary school I began taking off my glasses only when I went to bed,” he continued. “If the other kids called me ‘Snake-eyes' on the street I would run home and cry in front of the mirror. I found solace in books. According to Uncle Marcel my father became absorbed in the secular Jewish authors, starting with Kafka, just after noticing the peculiarity of my eyes. I found notes in Yiddish between the pages of two of the books he'd bequeathed to me. On the copyright page of
The Metamorphosis
was written, ‘Protection from the curse of Gluckman I: Books'; and in
The Trial
, ‘To live longer than Kafka: Punishment.'

“I did more than use books as a prophylactic to prevent the birth of a grotesque child. By becoming a secondhand book dealer I surprised my teachers. And I think that because I've come to prefer the pleasure of bringing to light a book hidden for eighty years to that of sex, my father's soul can rest in peace.

“Buenos Aires is the world's most bookish city. There are twelve million people in the suburbs and three million in the city center, and more than a thousand bookstores. To survive this kind of competition I started working also as a tourist guide three years ago. The hotels don't call me for the average naïve tourist, and I prefer working with travelers from surprise places. I would never reveal my face, like a strip tease artist, to someone with whom I didn't feel a connection. You're the second Turk who has looked into my eyes.'

I couldn't help but think that Ariel's family history had all the makings of a gothic Poe story.

I liked the Club del Vino's wedding-hall atmosphere and the clientele's stylish vintage clothes. They looked like they were on a movie set waiting for the director's call. I began losing interest in the trio on stage, though, because after each piece the other two members bowed long and repeatedly to the old pianist. In fact I was having trouble keeping my eyes open. Ariel took my arm to help me up. The soft winter wind revived me somewhat as we waited for a taxi at the door.