Serenade for Nadia

by Zülfü Livaneli

  I took Kerem’s printouts and said good night to him. Then, as I lay in bed reading them I found myself becoming completely absorbed.

  * * *

  —

  My neck is stiff from writing for so long, or rather from copying and pasting, collating, and working on what I’ve already written. My right side is beginning to ache. I need to get up and move around a bit. We must be about halfway across the Atlantic by now, and I’m anxious to finish by the time we reach Boston. Most of the rest of the story is already in place, I just have to pull it together and fill in some details, so it shouldn’t be too difficult. But my laptop’s battery is running low and I have to figure out what to do about this.

  I go over to the flight attendant sitting in the front and start a conversation with her. I ask her how long they stay in America, when they make the return journey, how they cope with jet lag. She must be bored, as she’s happy to answer.

  They usually lay over for three days after a transatlantic flight. Another team flies the plane back. Jet lag tends to be worse flying back to Europe than flying out to America. Some pilots and crew use melatonin to regulate their sleep, but she, Renata, prefers not to. In the meantime, was there anything I’d like? She could get me a plate of chilled fruit if I wanted. By the way, was I a writer? She’d noticed I’d been writing since the plane took off.

  I tell her that I’m writing about one of the German professors who immigrated to Turkey during World War II. She says she’s never heard about anything like that, and I smile and say that few people have. Then I thank her, say that a plate of fruit would be wonderful, and ask her if it would be possible for her to charge my laptop.

  “Of course,” she says.

  We go back to my seat together, I give her my laptop and she takes it back to her station and plugs it in. Now I’ll eat the fruit and get a little sleep while the battery is recharging. Thanks Renata.

  CHAPTER 9

  Your Excellency,

  As Honorary President of the World Union “OSE” I beg to apply to Your Excellency to allow forty professors and doctors from Germany to continue their scientific and medical work in Turkey. The above mentioned cannot practice further in Germany on account of the laws governing there now. The majority of these men possess vast experience, knowledge, and scientific merits and could prove very useful when settling in a new country.

  Out of a great number of applicants our Union has chosen forty experienced specialists and prominent scholars, and is herewith applying to Your Excellency to permit these men to settle and practice in your country. These scientists are willing to work for a year without any remuneration in any of your institutions, according to the orders of your Government.

  In supporting this application, I take the liberty to express my hope that in granting this request your Government will not only perform an act of high humanity, but will also bring profit to your own country.

  I have the honor to be,

  Your Excellency’s obedient servant,

  Prof. Albert Einstein

  Kerem’s notes at the bottom of the page said that this letter, signed by Einstein, had been written on 17 September 1933, and sent to the prime minister of the Turkish Republic. I was curious about what OSE stood for, so I turned on my laptop and did a search on the internet.

  What I learned was that the OSE was an international organization to aid Jews. It had originally been founded in Russia as a charitable society and later, when it was headquartered in Paris, it had become active in helping Jews living under the Nazi regime. I also learned that Albert Einstein had served as honorary president.

  A lot of Turkish websites had articles about “Einstein’s letter to Atatürk,” but I learned that the letter had been addressed not to Atatürk, who was president of Turkey, but to the prime minister, and that it had probably not been written by Einstein himself, who had already left for the United States by that date. It seems he had signed a number of blank pages before he left.

  There were notations in Turkish on the letter indicating that it had been received and read by the prime minister and then passed on to the minister of education. After consulting with the minister of education, the prime minister decided to turn down the request and sent the following letter dated 14 November 1933:

  Distinguished Professor,

  I have received your letter dated 17 September 1933 requesting acceptance by Turkey of 40 professors and physicians who cannot conduct their scientific and medical work in Germany anymore under the laws governing Germany now.

  I have also taken note that these gentlemen will accept working without remuneration for a year in our establishments under our government.

  Although I accept that your proposal is very attractive, I regret to inform you that I see no possibility of rendering it compatible with the laws and regulations of our country.

  Distinguished Professor, as you know, we now have more than 40 professors and physicians under contract in our employ. Most of them find themselves under the same political conditions while having similar qualifications and capacities. These professors and doctors have accepted to work here under the current laws and regulations in power.

  At present, we are trying to found a very delicate organism with members of very different origins, cultures, and languages. Therefore I regret to say that it would be impossible to employ more personnel from among these gentlemen under the current conditions we find ourselves in.

  Distinguished Professor, I express my distress for being unable to fulfill your request and request that you believe in my best sentiments.

  However, Atatürk took a personal interest in the matter and intervened, believing that these professors could make a valuable contribution to Turkey’s modernization. Indeed, Turkey ended up accepting a total of 190 professors, first from Germany, then from Austria after the Anschluss of 1938, and then from Prague after the 1939 Nazi invasion.

  When the first group of scholars arrived, Atatürk invited them to a banquet given in honor of the Shah of Iran at Dolmabahçe Palace, and welcomed each of them individually. Professor Alfred Kantorowicz even treated the Shah’s teeth, and the ophthalmologist Joseph Igersheimer wrote him a prescription for a new pair of glasses.

  I drifted off to sleep thinking about these people who had been uprooted, forced to live different lives—like my grandmothers—and that these were the lucky ones, because so many others had had their lives snuffed out. For what?

  CHAPTER 10

  I woke the next morning with the papers spread all over the bed and my laptop still on beside me. All these things that I hadn’t known a few days ago had taken over my life. Wagner, the Sutuuma, Nadia, spies…

  I thought about the white Renault. I hadn’t seen those three men for a while. Had they decided to stop following me? Had my brother warned them off me? Perhaps he’d taken over the case. Could he be having me watched now?

  I’d seen Wagner’s file on his desk. Had he just received it or had he been involved from the beginning? But when I’d called from Şile he’d acted as if he didn’t know anything. Indeed, he’d seemed surprised.

  Whatever the truth was, I still had to get on with my daily life. Get Kerem out of bed and give him breakfast, get dressed, and get myself to work.

  I didn’t have the strength to make an elaborate breakfast. I was feeling lethargic and my joints were aching, and I would have liked to stay home and watch television or read all day. So instead of eggs and sausage we had corn flakes.

  Kerem never paid much attention to the time in the morning because I always pestered him to be on time for the school bus. He didn’t have to think about it because he knew I’d make sure he was on time. But that morning he was surprised because I didn’t say anything at all.

  He was dawdling over his breakfast, but after a while he noticed something was wrong and looked at his watch. Then he looked pointedly at me, but
I didn’t pay any attention and continued reading my newspaper. He seemed worried, but didn’t say anything.

  Then after looking at his watch again, he asked, “What day is it today?”

  Without lifting my head from the newspaper I said, “Friday.”

  Then after a moment, and without looking up, I asked, “What’s the matter?”

  “I mean it’s not the weekend. There’s school.”

  “Yes,” I said, absentmindedly and turned a page of the paper.

  He waited me out as long as he could, then got up and said, “What’s the matter with you? I’m going to miss the school bus. There’s two minutes to go.”

  “Is that so,” I said. “I had no idea.”

  He ran to the hall and began to put on his coat. He tried to behave like an angry man and the more he did, the more childish he seemed. I went over to him and laughed.

  “No need to hurry. I’m taking you to school today.”

  “You?”

  “Yes,” I went and looked out the window. Ilyas was already there. I called Kerem over and showed him the Ford Focus waiting outside the front door. Ilyas was leaning against the car smoking a cigarette.

  “There,” I said. “That’s our car and that’s our driver.”

  “Shit!” he said, then immediately put his hand over his mouth.

  “Am I going to go to school in a chauffeur-driven car like the rich kids?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did the university give you a car? Is it because of Wagner?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m beginning to like this man more and more.”

  I had one more surprise for him but I wasn’t going to tell him yet. We went out and got into the car. Ilyas opened the door for me. Kerem sat on my left, and glanced out the window to see if any of the neighbors were watching. He was enjoying this. As we approached the school he began to smile, and I took advantage of the situation to kiss him on the cheek before he got out of the car.

  As soon as I got to my office, I settled down to deal with all the work that had piled up in the past few days. Then, at lunchtime, I went to the faculty dining room. Not because I was hungry, but to see Nermin, a friend who worked in the archives and always ate lunch in the faculty dining room. I found her at her usual table, and when she saw me she looked up and smiled.

  “Maya! I haven’t seen you for ages.”

  We made small talk over lunch, and then at one point I told her I needed to find some information on a guest I was showing around.

  “Professor Wagner?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I replied.

  “Of course,” she said. “We have a separate section about foreign professors who’ve worked at our university. Come and have a look whenever you like.”

  “May I come after lunch?” I asked.

  She could only nod and blink because her mouth was full.

  Half an hour later I was in the archive library, where Nermin told me they were in the process of entering hundreds of thousands of files into the computer system.

  “Have the files on the foreign professors been entered yet?”

  “No, unfortunately we haven’t got to them yet. You just wouldn’t believe how many documents there are.”

  She led me down an aisle through walls of documents.

  “Here you are,” she said. “Everything you’re looking for will be here. I’m sorry but I’ll have to let you get on with this by yourself. I’m swamped.”

  I was only too happy to be left alone. I began to read the names of the files. Ernst Reuter, Fritz Neumark, Paul Hindemith, Alfred Braun, Ruth Sello, Robert Anhegger, Maximilian Ruben, Ernst Praetorius, Rudolf Belling, Carl Ebert, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, Julius Stern, Bruno Taut, Hans Bodlaender, Eduard Zuckmayer, George Tabori, Alfred Joachim Fischer, Clemens Holzmeister, Martin Wagner, Gustav Oelsner, Erna Eckstein, and Ernst Engelberg…The list went on and on. Most of these professors had stayed in Istanbul, though a few had gone to Ankara.

  I found the following in one of the files.

  The professors who fled to Turkey from Nazi Germany formed the backbone of Istanbul University. The University Reform drawn up by the Swiss medical professor Albert Malche was implemented in 1933. The university’s Ottoman name, Darülfünün, was changed to Istanbul University.

  The new Turkish Republic was ten years old, and the regime’s effort to westernize relied on German scholars in such disciplines as law and medicine to compile libraries, codify teaching methods, and train archaeologists. There were also professors of botany, geology, chemistry, and biochemistry. The professors would be allowed to lecture through interpreters for the first three years, after which they would be expected to lecture in Turkish. The German professors were to be paid a salary five times higher than that of their Turkish colleagues.

  Despite earning a relatively high salary, many of these professors had difficulty adjusting. Some had difficulty learning Turkish and dealing with their own cultural prejudices. Many of their Turkish colleagues were resentful of their presence and of their much higher salaries. There was pressure from the German authorities and from the many Nazi sympathizers, both German and native, who were present in the country at the time. Despite this they laid the foundations of the Turkish education system, and some of them stayed in this country for decades and were even buried in Turkey.

  The graves of Curt Kosswig and Professor Dr. Erich Frank were next to each other in the Aşiyan Cemetery by the Bosporus. The renowned architect, Bruno Taut, was laid to rest in the Edirnekapı Cemetery, and the archaeologist, Clemens Bosch, in Feriköy.

  Professor Fritz Neumark established the School of Economics and remained in Turkey for nineteen years. After returning to Germany he served twice as the rector of Frankfurt University. Ernst Reuter established the Urban Settlement and City Planning Institute and served as an advisor to the government in Ankara, and in 1947 returned to Germany to become the first mayor of occupied Berlin.

  Professor Ordinarius Wilhelm Röpke was a famous economist; Professor Ordinarius Umberto Ricci was a faculty member of the University of Rome; Professor Bruno Taut was the founder of the Bauhaus School; Professor Clemens Holzmeister, an urbanologist; Professor Kurt Bittel, an archaeologist…The list went on.

  There were hundreds of names, but Professor Ernst Hirsch, who became a Turkish citizen in 1934, popped up again and again. His book, Pratik Hukukta Metot, was still used as a reference by Turkish lawyers. Erich Auerbach, one of the greatest names in literary criticism, wrote his work Mimesis in Turkey. I noticed the files all contained handwritten notes indicating whether the subject was Aryan, Jewish, or mixed.

  I still hadn’t found anything on Maximilian Wagner, so I concentrated on trying to find his file. It took some effort before I finally found it. But as soon as I pulled it out, something about it seemed wrong. All the other files had been quite thick, but his contained only two sheets of paper.

  The first was an official report that Aryan Maximilian Wagner, a German national and a lecturer at Istanbul University, had been arrested by Turkish security authorities and later deported. The report also stated that he had been declared persona non grata by the Cabinet, and that a copy of the document had been sent to the National Security Agency.

  The second document stated that a Mr. Scurla, personal representative of Adolf Hitler, had come to the university to investigate Professor Wagner, and had denounced him to the rector as a British spy who sent coded messages in the form of musical scores.

  Nermin was busy so I just waved goodbye to her and went back to my office. There was still a lot of work for me to catch up on, but I couldn’t focus enough to even begin, so I just sat and had a coffee and tried to pull my thoughts together. So, Maximilian Wagner had been a spy after all. It didn’t quite fit. That is, it didn’t feel right. But of course, how well did I know him? I liked him, but did my liking him me
an he couldn’t be a spy? Besides, being a spy against the Nazis during World War II didn’t make him a villain either. And what about Scurla? Had Wagner really been using musical scores as code? I supposed it was possible. But then did his violin have anything to do with this? It seemed strange that he would bring his violin with him on such a brief trip. Had the piece he’d played by the raging sea been part of a coded message? But if so, who had the message been intended for? There’d been no one there to hear it. Except me. Perhaps he’d been symbolically completing a mission he’d failed to accomplish during the war. No, nothing about it made sense.

  Kerem would be home by now. I phoned Ilyas and asked him to pick Kerem up and bring him to the university. Then I called Kerem to tell him that Ilyas would be picking him up. He immediately thought something was wrong.

  “What’s the matter? Has something happened?”

  “No, there’s nothing wrong.”

  I folded my arms on my desk, rested my head on them and closed my eyes, imagining myself in Artvin, on the Kafkasör Plateau, in the Kaçkar Mountains. I was struggling through the snow, surrounded by white mountain peaks, the cold air causing a slight ache in my chest. Two years ago I’d taken a camping trip in the Kaçkar Mountains, and it had been one of the most magical experiences of my life. I remembered the frozen waterfalls that looked like fantastic ice-sculpture, the wooden houses perched here and there on ledges that seemed impossible to reach. I’d felt so happy, clear-headed, and healthy that I didn’t want to leave, and I’d brought three pine saplings back to Istanbul with me as a memento. Two of them had died but one was still growing in my living room, and I always felt a special warmth in my heart when I saw it.

  A little later the janitor came in with my mail. I didn’t open all the envelopes but just glanced at them. There was nothing important. Then the telephone on my desk rang. I picked it up. Gizem, the trainee who’d just begun working in the rector’s office, was on the other end.