Many and Many a Year Ago

by Selcuk Altun

  As I was paying my check in a Kızılay restaurant one night, about to bolt from the place in exasperation, I realized that the cellphone ringing so insistently was my own. (Civilian life can be a real pain.) A confident voice said to me, “I’m Suat Altan’s twin brother, Lieutenant. We need to talk about something important that concerns you.” My head instantly began to throb. I couldn’t remember Suat ever mentioning a brother, let alone a twin. The voice continued imperiously, directing me to be at the lobby of the Sheraton in half an hour. “You won’t have a problem recognizing me.”

  This magnificent hotel was my favorite building in the capital and it was with some excitement that I started walking toward it. It was like a lighthouse on the city’s horizon. I used to gaze at it from afar, wondering whether my feelings toward it would change if I saw the interior. Not until the moment I reached the grand entrance did it occur to me to wonder why I had been invited here. It had been a good while since I stopped thinking about myself in relation to God’s chosen few. Now I remembered the expression “No good deed goes unpunished.” I felt sure that some kind of chore awaited me thanks to that schizophrenic conscript I’d once helped out. I could have sworn, if the man who stepped out of a cloud of smoke and noise with an artificial smile on his face had not had a cigar in his hand, that he was Suat Altan himself.

  “Welcome, Lieutenant,” he said. “I told you you’d have no problem recognizing me. Aside from my being born twenty minutes before Suat, we’re identical twins.”

  I had the feeling this wasn’t the first time he’d made this clichéd introduction. Would I come up to his room, please, the better to chat? As we entered the elevator with a group of mustachioed civilians conversing in an accent I didn’t recognize, my back began to itch. The elevator began its ascent to the top floor and I knew it was time to consider what my next dramatic surprise would be. Fuat led the way into the suite. I moved to the big window with the panoramic view. It was as if I were back in that peculiar funhouse world of mine in Z. If Fuat hadn’t broken in on my thoughts by asking what I wanted to drink, I would have started categorizing the buildings spread out before me: the prettiest, the ugliest; governmental, private; and so on.

  “Mineral water,” I answered, and took a seat on the humblest chair in the room.

  Fuat fished a half-empty bottle of cognac from a drawer and took a long sip as he walked to the elegant desk. I hadn’t expected a CD player to be there. But he extracted a CD from a heap of newspapers and magazines and put it in the machine, then parked himself in the armchair opposite me. His face wore a sour expression, perhaps from the effort of executing an order that he hadn’t been able to comprehend himself. While Vladimir Horowitz’s magic fingers mastered a Chopin mazurka, I wondered how he would begin his speech. I didn’t expect us to start with “May I call you by your first name?”

  “Maybe in a few months, but not now,” I replied. I knew I would be nervous and my right hand would shake.

  Another sip from the bottle and the face turned sour again. It was if he were in the company of a person of inferior rank who habitually annoyed him. One more ill-mannered gesture and I would be on my way out.

  But after a brief hesitation and an artificial laugh he said, “Listen to me, Lieutenant! I have a message for you from Suat. He told me about what you’ve been going through. I hope you’ll overcome it in good style. Let me tell you straight off that I haven’t come here to add another burden to those you’ve already got. If you can manage to hear me out patiently, you’ll see that I might even have something that’s good for you.

  “My mother gave birth to us at San Francisco Hospital after a complicated labor. I was born at midnight on 21 May, and Suat twenty minutes later, on 22 May. This interval put us under two different zodiacal influences—me, Taurus; Suat, Gemini. My brother began to walk when he was ten months old; me, two months later. About this time my paternal grandfather died and we moved back to Istanbul to live with my grandmother.

  “Though we were identical twins, Suat and I had diametrically opposing personalities. It looked as if the plusses and minuses of a whole had been parceled out to us indiscriminately. Maybe that was why we were so fond of each other. I was known as the calm, tolerant, decisive one, whereas he was distinguished by his aggressive intelligence and mysterious nature. He alternated between being an introvert and a social butterfly. I didn’t take it amiss that I was overshadowed by his genius. In fact I got used to my grandfather’s witticisms at my expense—like ‘When God was handing out the brains, he gave a portion and a half to Suat, which left a half of a half for you.’ My brother was a fragile child, and when necessary I acted as if I were twenty months, not twenty minutes, older than him to protect him.

  “Whereas Suat was one of the top students to be accepted into the famous Robert College, I barely got into a French high school, and then only with his help. Our family was used to his shutting himself in his room to indulge his love for computers and mathematics, but it was really something else when he mastered financial and accounting terminology so that he could play the stock market. One episode I’ll never forget. It was during one of those perennial economic crises in Turkey when the Istanbul stock market had fallen drastically. Suat told my father about a leading bank whose market value had dropped to $80 million while the buildings alone, he claimed, were worth $500 million. Not to hurt Suat’s feelings, my father bought $10,000 worth of shares. My grandfather, on the other hand, who believed in Suat’s genius, bought $500,000 worth. We learned all this two years later, when Suat made him sell. The bank’s value was now more than $11 billion—one hundred and forty times what it had been. My father got $1.4 million for his $10,000, and my grandfather made $69 million on his $500,000.

  “My twin was also fond of Uncle Izak Toledo, who was actually the twin brother of my mother. Uncle Izak was a professor of literature at the University of Jerusalem but spent his summers in Istanbul, in his dimly lit apartment in Balat, living like a recluse. It was under his influence that Suat took an interest in poetry. The intensity with which he became an Edgar Allan Poe fanatic scared even my uncle. My brother memorized every poem and short story of Poe and considered his every work of fiction to be a geometrical masterpiece of plot structure. We were astonished when he chose to attend the University of Virginia, Poe’s hangout, in order to continue his education in computer engineering and English literature.

  “We were all shocked by the painful news that my uncle had been killed by a suicide bomber on a bus. (As a pure Marxist he believed that owning a car was selfish.)

  “Suat became more and more anti-social after that. He questioned every value and virtue. Though he had no interest in material possession, he became obsessed with making money. Now, in Virginia, he continued fearlessly to play the Istanbul Stock Market by pitting the fragile Turkish lira against the elite currencies of the world, and he made millions.

  “My grandfather considered himself responsible for my uncle’s death. This man of great strength, with a take-no-prisoners attitude, didn’t give a damn about his health. After he died we discovered that he’d thrown his heart pills into the Iznik vase. Suat’s behavior at the synagogue and cemetery turned our grief to panic. He started by weeping at the foot of the coffin, then began talking loudly to the corpse, and ended up giggling uncontrollably. I’ll never forget the sight of his motionless silhouette in the cemetery. It was as if he were awaiting a command, his eyes focused on a ray of divine light nobody else could see. ‘Go talk to your brother,’ my father said to me. I approached him cautiously, knowing that he was reading my eyes for my intentions.

  “‘Don’t worry, Fuat,’ he said. ‘I sometimes have these odd reactions at dramatic moments, but they always pass.’

  “He invited me to visit him at Christmas. Suat, with his cape-like overcoat, thin moustache, and long hair parted down the middle, was starting to look a bit like Poe. His house was in the city’s wealthiest and loneliest district. A Doberman and a Siamese cat lived in uneasy harmon
y and made no attempt to get to know me. I must confess that Suat’s study was appalling. His desk was a huge glass cube that I first took to be an aquarium. In fact there were four very small sharks swimming languidly around inside it. On New Year’s Eve Suat’s mysterious girlfriend was at the house. Maria, the daughter of a Mexican stable hand, was a waif who didn’t look a day over thirteen, which was in fact Virginia’s age when she married her twenty-seven-year-old cousin Edgar Allan.

  “Suat was a sophomore and already considered one of the top software programmers in the U.S. He amused us by telling us how he worked with one of his professors on certain think-tank projects and made unspeakable sums of money.

  “Toward the end of a holiday that we took in Miami, New Orleans, and Las Vegas I started feeling uneasy. Though we looked exactly alike, I was absorbing the reality that we were growing farther and farther apart. While flying back to Geneva I decided to keep better tabs on Suat, though not of course to disturb him.

  “I knew that he’d signed contracts with international corporations even before graduating. As soon as he graduated he moved to New York. I settled down meanwhile in Geneva. I had all kinds of difficulties in reaching Suat; he, on the other hand, continually sent emails to me at odd times from places like El Paso and San Diego. This annoyed me. Still, when he invited me for the next New Year’s, I flew to New York despite my heavy workload. As his African-American Moslem chauffeur drove me from the airport to Suat’s Central Park duplex, I wondered which of the residents I would meet this time. I wasn’t sorry to note that the fish were gone, but seeing Maria again upset me. She looked older now than thirteen, or even sixteen, but I was repulsed by the theatrical show of respect she paid my brother. As the housekeeper took me to my room she filled me in. The relationship was totally platonic. Her master was financing Maria’s education and supervising her personal development to the point where her manners would meet with his approval. They would marry as soon as she graduated. I suspected that the housekeeper was passing on this philanthropic rubbish to me as part of a plan hatched by my brother. I made my excuses and headed back to Geneva the next day.

  “Six months later, after I’d ignored two emotional messages, he resorted to our mother. She went to New York for a month and stopped in at Geneva on her way home. It seems that while visiting her uncle in Mexico City Maria had gone to a disco where there had been a terrible fire, and she had been among its victims. I was certain that Suat would be doubly tormented by his doubts regarding his beloved’s fidelity. My mother, who was totally in denial, focused on talking about Suat’s professional success. I was glad she hadn’t realized that her genius son was living in the twenty-first century by day, and in the nineteenth by night.

  “I never saw a more harmonious couple than my parents. We lost my father three years ago. A drunken taxi driver jumped the curb and ploughed into him while he stood reading a book at the bus stop. My mother sank into a severe depression. I took her to Geneva. On the day I thought she was finally about to pull herself together, she swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills …

  “It was interesting that Suat faced all these tragedies more stoically than I. He was calm and generous during the inheritance proceedings. We divided the money and the stocks equally. I visited Suat every three months, and I became quite familiar with the way he looked down on everything and everybody around him. I thought he looked like those fundamentalist bodyguards who stand around twirling their amber prayer beads and waiting for orders. Besides his chauffeur, there was now a Japanese assistant, toward whom Suat was most respectful. The three of them would often go out on secret excursions together.

  “I don’t know why he wanted to get his military service over with—he could have waited another three years. I was in Istanbul when he finished it. He barged into my office carrying a thick envelope that he said was to be opened two months later. He appeared more rested and energetic than I ever expected. Just after this I read in the papers that the taxi driver who murdered our father had been killed in a robbery. It seems he’d been let out of jail early.

  “I never saw my twin brother again. His last words were, ‘I’ve got my discharge papers and if I don’t get out of here I’ll go crazy.’ For two weeks my messages went unanswered, then I flew to New York. There was a new tenant in his apartment. Suat had disappeared into thin air along with his pets and assistants. Nobody knew anything about where they might be. I had no idea if he was on another secret project or if he’d committed suicide, but I was perfectly aware that I was no closer than his cat was to his inner world. That night I didn’t sleep a wink. At the last minute, however, I gave up the idea of going to the police and decided I should go back to Geneva and wait for a sign. Days full of nightmares went by, then suddenly I remembered the envelope in my safe. Hoping to find some kind of clue, I opened it five days ahead of time.

  “The reason I told you about my family in such detail is because of the four items that came out of this envelope. It’s debatable whether they constitute a will; what’s not debatable is that you’ve hit the jackpot. This is what was in that envelope: a $2.4 million check made out to me, a notarized letter giving me power of attorney, written instructions on how to deal with the check, and a personal letter for you.

  “What Suat wants is, firstly, for me to deposit the check in an account to be opened at our Geneva bank. Then, every month, $5,000 will be transferred to your bank account. This arrangement will start when you retire from military service and will continue for forty years. At the end of each year the accumulated interest will be added to your account as well. If you die before all this is finished, the fund will go to your heirs, or, if that doesn’t work out, to the Foundation for Support of the Turkish Air Force.

  “There’s more. Suat meticulously restored the house he inherited in Balat, and always stayed there when he came to Istanbul. His directive states that I’m to transfer that property to you.

  “Well, I suppose there’s good reason for what my brother wants to do. But what I’ve been curious about ever since I opened the envelope is what’s in that personal letter to you. If the clue I’m after happens to be in there, let’s have it, Lieutenant, please.”

  *

  I was exhausted by this tirade. All that stuff concerning me could easily be a trap, or a joke. I took the letter from the outstretched hand of the civilian whose other hand had gone to the bottle with every pause in his speech. I intended to read it quickly and hand it back to him. With so many of my own troubles, I was perfectly indifferent to the crises of these rich twins playing hide-and-seek. (Like a man developing a hunger at the wrong moment, I had the feeling I was missing Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3.) A UNICEF card fell out of the envelope. On the front was a drawing of a violin surrounded by the words: “MOZART, ALLES GUTE.” Inside was a thin piece of faded paper, which I guessed was a photocopy of the check that Fuat had mentioned. There were also two notes signed by Suat, which appealed to me because they were short. One of them said, in English, “It is hereby certified that Kemal Kuray is to be the recipient of this check and the accrued interest.” As I looked at the signature, which looked like Kufic script, those blue panic-stricken eyes came to mind.

  Staring at the shaky handwriting on a postcard, my right hand began to tremble, and I turned my back to the civilian whose cigar had gone out again.

  Commander,

  When I was a child I used to think that great men were rewarded with death to increase the treasures of heaven. In high school I thought that the injustices blocking the paths of good people were entrance tests for heaven. In the end I believed that heaven and hell were wandering the earth arm in arm.

  My twin brother Fuat, whose astrological sign is different from mine, blames my obsession with heaven and hell and night and day on my being a Gemini.

  I don’t remember who first said, “Incomplete praise is a stain on honor.” But as you are a good person, I’m sure you won’t refuse the check I left with my brother. My mother used to say that t
he house in Balat never brought any luck to my uncle. To me it was neither lucky nor unlucky. But now I think it’s time real luck arrived, and that it’s you who should benefit from this turn of events.

  I think that the night is the true owner of the sky. From now on I will try to take refuge in the night, Commander…

  S.A.

  I read and reread these Tchaikovskyian lines. If he hadn’t committed suicide, Suat had certainly left a mysterious trail. I knew that the bewildered Fuat would be staring at me imploringly.

  I turned to him and said, “Suat didn’t leave a clue. He wants me to take the money and the property. If there were some kind of tragic situation here, there would surely be an indication in these lines.”

  He relaxed a bit. He deserved to know about the bond between his twin brother and myself, so I told him everything about me—except for the part about my father’s choice of career. I couldn’t accept Suat’s offer without talking to my doctor and commanders, so I asked for twenty-four hours.

  I announced to the authorities that I was prepared to request retirement if I was no longer able to fly. (Had there been even a glimmer of hope, I would have turned down all the mansions on the Bosphorus.) I received the lukewarm response I had expected and called Fuat to tell him I was retiring. He asked for my bank details, which I duly gave him, and we made an appointment to meet at the Pera Palace Hotel to arrange the transfer of the Balat house.

  II

  The hotel was hibernating its way through the last days of winter. I was given the Ernest Hemingway room, which had perhaps remained unchanged for ninety years. From my creaky window I had a bird’s eye view of the Golden Horn. It looked like another country out there. I went downstairs and out to Istiklal Avenue to mull over the prospects of my new abode. While I was on Istiklal, whose winding course from Tünel to Taksim had always reminded me of the River Ganges, I decided to do some research.