Though Lutfullah conveyed his triumphant message with astounding lucidity, he pinned his coming to an indefinite date, leaving us with a fair idea as to how much opium he had consumed that day. This did little to help his case, as the government in power took a dim view of the affair; Mahmud Sevket Pasha had not yet been assassinated and Istanbul was seething with political unrest.
Thank God Lutfullah was able to speak more clearly on the matter once the effects of the drugs had faded, particularly during his first interrogation. He spoke at length about Aselban, the treasure of Andronikos, the battles waged by his guardian spirits at the sight of the treasure, and the disgruntled treachery of those evil spirits who pestered him, dressed up to resemble some sort of fifth column. Perhaps the messiah idea had been instilled in him by those same evil and capricious spirits. Having shunted the blame to Abdazah, a spirit so evil as to be well beyond the grasp of any government or police force, he came around to the idea that his case should be viewed as exceptional.
Following Lutfullah’s detention, I was called into the police station, along with my father, Abdüsselam Bey, and Sadi Efendi from Isparta, who had taken Nuri Efendi’s place at the Time Workshop. While waiting in the corridor to give our statements, Nasit Bey (whom we hadn’t seen since his marriage to my aunt) entered the building. And what an entrance it was.
This was not the Nasit Bey we had known—that avuncular man whose face, if not reflecting the simple joy of being alive, conveyed sadness and anxiety about his finances. Now his entire being exuded grandeur and gravitas. His moustache, which had previously drooped over his jowls, pointed upward in defiance of gravity, while his eyes, narrowed by sadness, were as hard as stones, with a piercing gaze that seemed to cut through the seen world to confront the one beyond. With a honey-colored overcoat in place of his old hunting jacket and a golden cane in his hand, he ambled toward us with ponderous steps that bespoke the seriousness of the occasion, which is to say that he left us in no doubt about the significance of his coming all the way down to the station to rescue us. Striding past us with a pride that reflected a fortune worth a couple of hundred thousand liras, and with all the power and prestige of the Committee for Union and Progress behind him, he stepped into the room where Abdüsselam Bey was undergoing his police interview.
About ten minutes later, they burst from the room. My father took this opportunity to congratulate his old friend and new relation and wish him every happiness. I took Nasit Bey’s hand and kissed it before pressing it to my forehead. Ah, the good old days. This man who used to stop me on the street in Büyükçekmece to urge me to take his daughter’s hand in marriage, this man who’d had nothing to say beyond a single bland assurance—“In just a couple years now you’ll be the new young man in our family”—now reluctantly offered me his hand, and after I had kissed it, he abruptly pulled it back to wipe it clean with a handkerchief before putting on his gloves. But having him there—Abdüsselam played a small part in the matter as well—did seem to expedite matters. After the men of importance had given their statements, it seemed unnecessary for us to do the same—in fact it took on the colors of a tiresome chore: “We’ll call you when we need you,” the police officer grumbled, and sent us home.
Two days later Seyit Lutfullah (having been declared “a drug user and, while not in full possession of his mental faculties, nevertheless a madman and a risk to society at this point in time”) was exiled to Sinop on the coast of the Black Sea.
On the evening of the day Lutfullah left town, a police officer brought us a basket with Çesminigâr inside; using rather strong language, he urged us to do everything we could to look after the tortoise. “The hoca efendi took all his books with him,” he told us. Thus we inherited what you might call our share of Andronikos’s treasure.
But Çesminigâr did not prove to be as loyal as Safinaz. The creature never warmed to our home. While Safinaz Hanım never left the little bay window nook, the only spot in the house where you could actually breathe and observe the outside world, the tortoise escaped from the house, whenever it could, to trundle about the neighborhood. Almost every day one of us, or one of our neighbors, would find the little beast in the Mihrimah Mosque, in one of the neighbors’ gardens, or beneath the hooves of a carriage horse.
I have noticed that fairy tales always start with a name. Assign a name to your jacket or bow tie, and though they may be lacking in function or beauty, their identity suddenly shifts—voilà! they have acquired a personality. The people in our neighborhood gave Çesminigâr the name Emanet, or Bond, probably because they found the name Çesminigâr a little antiquated. And of course no one in the neighborhood wanted to lose their Bond. We all patrolled the streets with our eyes glued to the ground. The extraordinary attention we attach to benevolent deeds meant that someone was sure to find Bond in some secluded corner and hasten him back to our house, scolding us for having ever let him escape. To many on the outside, these hunts for Bond seemed futile, but with every escape, the tortoise internalized the topography of the neighborhood, until one day it went missing for good. It was with fear that I conveyed the terrible news to Lutfullah. The response we received from the castle in Sinop was truly remarkable. In his letter, scribbled in nearly illegible safranine ink, the political exile told us the tortoise had found him in Sinop and that we had nothing to worry about, that he—Lutfullah, not the tortoise—was in good health and busy in the region of Seyit Bilal with the hunt for the treasure of Gülsüm the Illiterate, which he would soon be unearthing, and upon doing so he would realize all his dreams, and, given these circumstances, he no longer needed the treasure of Andronikos and was bequeathing it to me. “I have been meeting with Aselban day and night, and during our travels together we converse. She has made you a brother of this world. And as a present she has given you the treasure of the emperor Andronikos. But you must come to know its true worth. As it now lies under the Maiden’s Tower, it might seem unattainable, but with our arrangements and our prayers, you need not harbor the slightest doubt that we shall have it transported to a neighborhood from which it will prove far easier to unearth. If not . . .”
So after losing almost everything, we found it all again—both the power and the fortune.
XIII
Following the banishment of Seyit Lutfullah, the question of my future was raised yet again. Like it or not, I had no choice but to return to the old watch repairman’s shop. The chief obstacle having been removed, the old master greeted me with open arms. But I was no longer the Hayri he once knew. The days when I would study watches and clocks and their secrets with love and admiration in Nuri Efendi’s Time Workshop were long over. I had been exposed to other ideas since then, and passed through many new forms during my schooling with Lutfullah. There was no longer any connection in my mind between the words “life” and “work.” For me, life was a fairy tale you invented while keeping your hands stuffed deep in your pockets. I found no joy sitting at the feet of an old man afflicted with rheumatism, listening to his endless complaints about whatever happened to cross his mind. So one day I placed before him the pin, the magnifying glass, and the key to the shop and dashed out to the street with the ten pennies or so I had left in my pocket from my earnings the day before. In one breath I was on the city walls. I was elated, as if all my problems had vanished in a flash. I spent that evening at one of the theaters in Sehzadebası. The whistles, the applause, the laughter, the cries of ticket salesmen on the streets, the lights on the stage, and above all the languorous look of that Armenian singer at the peak of her career, and her piquant voice—all seemed to promise new horizons. But what I loved most was watching how these men I met every day in the street or coffeehouse were made anew on the illuminated stage, as the brass band blared on. It was a dream come true! That night I made my decision. And three days later, I was a member of one of these improvisatory theater groups.
Naturally they never gave me an important role. And I was never under the illusion
that we performed anything noteworthy. Nevertheless 1913 was perhaps my finest year. My days were my own, from start to finish. Toward evening we would congregate in the theater, as if plotting surreptitiously against someone’s life. Then it would all begin in a great fury. The drums, horns, and clarinet on the streets would announce that the night was now ours, and we’d prepare the stage as if it were a parallel world. The audience would gather on the other side of the curtain, and the sound of their footsteps, the commotion, the screams, the jostling of the crowd, the impatient catcalls shook the foundations of the makeshift theater before the curtain finally opened. We would watch the first cantos from behind the audience. The old woman would shake her great belly before the crowd, and all would roar with applause, wise to the buffoonery but perhaps enjoying it all the more for that very reason, their whistles cutting through the air like it was cloth.
Everything was shabby, old, miserable, and cheap. But because I had passed through the school of Lutfullah, these cheap and miserable things seemed all the more beautiful to me for the illusions they helped create. The first garment I wore—a pair of aristocratic pantaloons from the era of Napoléon III—was torn in three places. As for the lady, or rather the countess, with whom I was to fall in love, she easily could have given birth to my mother. But what did any of this matter? The important thing was that my name was no longer Hayri, and that I was able, for a time, to break free of reality’s grip. In a word, it was an escape. I was living in an enchanted world of lies and illusion, and that was all I wanted.
What didn’t we perform? Our repertoire included all the great works. No Don Quixote ever stormed the windmills with such courage or panache. Sadly, in my third month there were retrenchments. And I was among those who had to go. So I decided to join a troupe in Kadıköy that performed kusdili in a rundown hall. My earnings from such endeavors were meager. I made hardly enough to cover my transportation. But this time the women in the group were young—as the troupe was new and undiscovered—and I fell in love with each and every one of them.
I would return to the European side of Istanbul, in the solitude of the final ferryboat, my mind dazzled by images of their loveliness and my body infested with lice left behind by previous passengers. But I should say that for once fortune actually smiled on me. I had even managed to take second and third supporting roles in our plays.
The third stage of my career again took place in Kadıköy; this time it was an operetta. I was able to try out my voice in these musicals, which vacillated between alaturca and alafranga styles. I managed to infuse the performances with the Hüzzam and Hüseyin makams I sang with my father every Thursday evening and Friday at the dervish lodge we frequented. Our director had only one obsession: the cleaning of his monocle! And the light reflected from that monocle seemed to ennoble everything it touched.
After the operetta we dabbled in traditional Ottoman mime theater, and then, at the insistence of Abdüsselam Bey, I joined the Municipal Theater Group, but I understood nothing of Antoine’s lessons. It was the Great War that rescued me from the chaos of this strange and tiring world that largely eluded my understanding. With the war, it seemed I finally set my feet on firm ground. But as always it felt too late.
PART II
LITTLE TRUTHS
I
Following my discharge from the army, I returned to Istanbul, where I found the city and its people much changed. Signs of poverty were everywhere; chaos and desperation reigned. My father had died in the war. My stepmother was living alone. The moment I set foot in the house, I knew those four years had been spent in vain. At home nothing had changed: The same calligraphic panels hung on the walls, and the same curtains, now more tattered and worn, hung from the doorways leading to rooms and the entrance hall; the house was as closed to the outside world as ever. In the front room, the lone straw mat on the floor, a footstep away from disintegration, filled the place with the stench of mold and mildew; and the Blessed One (our dustier-than-ever grandfather clock) huddled in the same old corner, calling to mind a decrepit camel fallen ill somewhere in the Caucasian deserts, dreaming deliriously of a time beyond all order.
As soon as I stepped inside I knew I had returned to my paternal home, to my childhood, to my youth—or whatever you would like to call it. What could I expect after those four years? I was as indolent as ever, indifferent to everything around me.
But those first days were not unduly depressing. My stepmother was born to show compassion. She was pitifully lonely, accustomed to living with only the idea of me; the day I arrived in person I thought she might die of joy. During those four desperate years, she had tended fastidiously to the great array of fruits in our large garden, making and then stockpiling preserves. I was shocked to see all the jars lined up on the breakfast table. “Have some of this plum jam. I made it when your father was still alive . . . And this sour cherry jam . . . I made last year. I kept it for you. No, dear, this sort of jam doesn’t go bad . . . And this apricot one here, oh, come now, just a little spoonful . . .” And so in one sitting I was force-fed jams for all seasons. The poor woman wouldn’t stop crying or throwing her arms around me. She thought me handsome, heroic, and resourceful; she wanted to hear of my noble adventures. If I tried to express my fears about the future, she would interrupt me and say, “Oh, come now. A man like you? How could a man like you not find a job?” And slowly I began to believe her.
I looked for work constantly, but at the time there were tens of thousands of other newly discharged young men like me looking for work in Istanbul. Every day the boats would bring in hundreds of new prisoners of war. I simply couldn’t find employment. My back wages provided a degree of comfort, but my life became a precarious balancing act on a wire spanning an abyss.
Not wishing to get tangled in the web of the past, I refrained from seeing my old acquaintances. Besides, there was no one left save for Abdüsselam Bey. To guarantee I would not cross paths with the poor man I’d once loved so dearly, I changed my walking route, avoiding the direct road to the War Office, which I visited quite frequently in those days, and taking the streets behind the Sehzade Mosque and Direklerarası instead.
But in the end the old man came and found me. This was three months after my return. Early one morning a carriage pulled up in front of our house and with some reluctance I peered out of the window and saw Abdüsselam stepping down. “Where’s that unfortunate son of yours?” he bellowed at the doorstep.
He didn’t come up to find me but waited for me in the courtyard as I dressed. Then he took me to his new villa in Soganaga, a smaller and more modest abode.
The splendor of his former villa, with its carriages and horses, its servants and abundant comforts, was not yet a distant memory. But its denizens had dispersed. Now the poor man lived with only his youngest daughter and his son-in-law, their children, Ferhat Bey (whose wife had died), two old servants, and Emine the chambermaid, who had been raised in his household, and whom I was to marry in two weeks’ time, as if there were nothing more important for me to do.
We went up to his room on the second floor. He sat me down on the divan, on which was perched a small chest of drawers from India. On top of the chest was a pile of envelopes, and from these he pulled out photographs one by one, describing where each had been taken.
I told him about my difficulties finding work, and he promised to help with my search. But nothing came of it. Abdüsselam Bey’s former friends had either vanished or changed so much that they no longer considered the man of any real import. After a few days pursuing leads, we decided it would be best for me to complete my studies. With his encouragement, and Ferhat Bey’s even more enthusiastic support, I enrolled in the Post and Telegraphy Academy. I don’t know why they chose this particular school, which seemed rather modest, at least from the outside; it was, after all, a time when most schools were so hard up for students that they had no choice but to rely on recruiting agents, even offer financial incentives t
o recruit students. Though the two men were very fond of me, their feelings about me hadn’t really changed. And Abdüsselam Bey had more important considerations in mind. My education wouldn’t last long; moreover, students were given a little pocket money. We came to the conclusion that working with telegraphs was not so different from working with watches and clocks—perhaps because they too ticked and had inside them this thing known as a mechanism.
“You already have this penchant for fiddling with such things—now at least you’ll be able to fiddle with them for a living,” they said.
After I had enrolled in the academy, or rather after I had negotiated the first step into a moderately secure future of my very own, Abdüsselam Bey announced that I was to marry Emine as soon as possible. The fact was that by that point I hardly ever left his home. Day and night he badgered me to propose. Marriage, I thought, might lessen my intimacy with him.
As he was almost a father to me already, an exchange of vows with Emine could serve only to formalize our relationship. It is unlikely she would have found anyone better than me; but, on second thought, she might have. As indeed she should have. Poor Emine! It’s hard to imagine myself ever finding anyone more perfect! There was never any strangeness between us; we had no problems getting along. And as we were all going to live together in the house in Soganaga, there was no need to worry about the things that impoverished newlyweds might find daunting, such as decorating a new home or making ends meet, and certainly not the “loneliness” of suddenly being left to ourselves—Abdüsselam made a point of stressing the loneliness. And so for all parties God’s will was done, bringing me comfort and peace of mind. Moreover—of course Abdüsselam never openly admitted this—in such a troubled time, when his business affairs, to use market terminology, were approaching collapse, new members could always join the household and, if pushed, my stepmother too. By drawing her into his home, he would have his revenge on the misfortune that had dogged him for so long.