Many and Many a Year Ago

by Selcuk Altun

  The city lights appeared in the distance as Sadi—not such a great driver, judging from his death grip on the steering wheel—was explaining, “Ayvalık, boss, is actually a holiday resort favored by anti-high society Istanbulites and Ankara bureaucrats.” He sounded like a collaborator trying to suck up to the invading army commander by giving him a reason to like the place.

  The pungent smell that affronted my nostrils at the Ayvalık Palace Hotel, located between the bazaar and the sea, was annoying, but it would grow on me. It was a fragrance secreted by olive oil factories on their night shift, and it followed me to my room like a friendly street dog. I asked the receptionist, who greeted me in English, if he knew Haluk Batumlu though I knew all too well what the answer would be. Bored by the view of the Martı Restaurant and the murky sea from my third-floor room, I wandered out to the bazaar. The olive-oil aroma, sadly, had gone. But I knew that strolling along these quiet dark streets would relax me. As I entered a café with a TV blaring, an analogy between myself and a dung-beetle rose to mind. The only customers were two old men practically glued to their table, gawking and grinning at the TV with the night-shift waiter.

  “Ayvalık only wakes up after the schools shut down for the summer,” said the horse-headed waiter when he brought me my sage tea. The old codgers stirred slightly during the commercials.

  “If anybody knew this fellow—at least if he had a government job—it would be Muhtar Celal. He’ll be dropping by the coffeehouse next to the Port Authority as soon as he finishes his breakfast,” said the swarthier of the two men, who gave a sniff of his nose after each round of his prayer beads.

  I stopped for breakfast at a café under an arbor of grapevines and was surprised by the friendly reaction of the waiter when I ordered a toasted cheese and tomato sandwich. The people meandering along the labyrinthine streets seemed to be moving two beats slower than normal. I wondered whether they would speed up when the tourist season began. Muhtar Celal appeared to be in his seventies and wore a woolen vest over his short-sleeved shirt. I had a fleeting urge to ask how he filled his days once he finished his morning newspaper. He observed that people had been calling him “Muhtar” ever since the day he ran for the councillor’s office and lost. No, he wasn’t aware of the existence of a person called Haluk Batumlu. There was, however, someone called Haluk Erçelik the French teacher, who had lived on Marshal Çakmak Avenue. But he didn’t know where this Haluk came from exactly, nor where he went when he left.

  I stood up with the pleasant feeling of having done my best, and walked happily off to buy a bus ticket to Istanbul. But as I neared the station, which looked more like a rodeo arena, my inner voice, that devil’s advocate, whispered: Is it possible that Haluk Batumlu changed his last name to cut his ties with the past?

  The pounding in my head intensified as I called Ali Uzel.

  “Professor, if a fanatic Stalinist wanted to change his last name, what would you advise him?”

  “In Russian, Stalin means ‘made of steel’,” he said. “Permit me to call to your attention the resemblance between ‘Stalin’ and ‘steel’ in English. If I were a Turkish Stalinist, I think I would choose a surname like ‘Çelik’ or ‘Özçelik.’ You know, ‘steel’ or ‘real steel.’”

  Or “Erçelik”—“true steel.”

  “Are you okay?” he asked, as I hung up. I was up to my neck again in the Haluk Batumlu case. I chuckled nervously to myself as, instead of asking for a ticket at the window, I requested directions to Marshal Çakmak Avenue.

  The streets that ran up the hill past a store selling books, stationery and real estate to the old Greek neighborhood had various sacred and epic names attached to them. The mortar smeared on the limestone buildings looked like poorly applied suntan lotion. The zigzag streets designed for bicycles and horse carts reminded me of Balat, except for the lack of screaming children. I was happily distracted from my search by the pleasant sight of bougainvillea vines and pomegranate branches draped over the stone walls. As for the women sulking at their windows, it was as if they had all turned down their radios so as not to miss the command, “Come on, get up, we’re going back!”, when it came.

  At the ground-floor window of a ruined building on Marshal Çakmak Avenue sat a smiling middle-aged man whose body, below his chest and shoulders, remained hidden. When I told him I had some business with Haluk Erçelik he became effusive.

  “Haluk the French teacher, God knows, was the Rock Hudson of Ayvalık society. He lived on the top floor of Number 19b, just behind you. The women and girls, young and old, used to dress to the nines and parade in front of his door. I think it was the year Tony Shumacher transferred to the Fenerbahçe football team—wow, that’s nearly twenty years ago—that his wife finally put her foot down and they moved away overnight. He told me that they’d bought an olive grove near C. village. Maybe …”

  Suddenly a very large white-haired woman appeared behind him, screeching, “Eh, Mahmut, enjoying ourselves with the passers-by again, are we? Don’t you know God will strike you down, Mahmut? Eh?” She swooped down on the smiling man and snatched him up, whereupon I saw that he indeed had no limbs.

  I had no better idea than to head down to the Clock Tower Mosque and watch the boys play football in the courtyard. My attention focused on a left-footed blond kid who ran circles around the opposing players and just grinned at his teammates whenever he lost the ball. When they got it back they passed it to him again. I soon wearied of watching this dramatic but repetitious circling. The match ended abruptly when a mosque official came out and planted himself in the middle of the courtyard. The sweaty boys scattered and in the wake of the cats and pigeons I also took my leave. It occurred to me while watching that blond ball-wizard that Hasan Gezgin and Halit Mesutoğlu could have been hiding something—a suspicion all the more reasonable if you looked at their stories side by side. The hope arose in me that if I bequeathed to Haluk Erçelik the happy news of his inheritance, he might reward me by spilling some dramatic secrets.

  Trusting that Mahmut the Fenerbahçe fan hadn’t been pulling my leg, I approached a dolmuş minibus idling beneath an acacia tree. I didn’t warm to the mustachioed driver, but I did enjoy the olive-oil fragrance that enveloped the vehicle.

  “You’ll be there in ten minutes,” said Bilal from Harput, who opened the door and gave me the seat beside him. As we slalomed through the olive groves in the direction of Edremit, I followed the parade of patient trees with amazement. “The youngest of those trees is two hundred years old,” Bilal said, “and the oldest is six hundred.”

  I was surprised too at the enormous mosque that appeared at the point where the tranquil village met the sea. The mosque looked like a blueprint for a town of 20,000 rather than the small village that it was. Not a person was in sight to ask directions. “Are they all at a meeting in the mosque?” Bilal asked, then hurried toward a man who finally appeared on the horizon. I waited on the bus. I understood that we’d found Haluk when I saw the grizzled villager pointing at a spot up in the hills. A mixture of curiosity and petulance swept over me and my right hand began to shake. I felt like praying for a flat tire.

  The hill we climbed was silent and covered with olive groves. A bashful boy who was studiously flicking a cigarette lighter showed us which house belonged to Haluk. Ancient stone walls protected the garden, and a green mailbox hung next to the main gate. With a silent Bismillah I pushed the doorbell. A middle-aged man who looked like a bodyguard emerged and said with some surliness, “What d’ya want?” I told him I was bringing news of his boss’s old-time pals Halit and Hasan. He barked a command—it sounded like Kurdish—and threw his cellphone to a little girl in a bright red dress who came running up. She pushed a couple of buttons—trying hard not to laugh—and handed the phone back to her father. I knew the exchange between this neatly mustachioed fellow and his boss would be short.

  Immediately on entering the rectangular garden, I had to let myself be sniffed by a large Kangal mastiff named Arrow. “Otherwi
se, God forbid, he might tear you to pieces,” said Haluk’s long-time factotum. The man was Zakir by name, and hailed from Bitlis in the east. Having mentioned in passing that he could hit the eye of a blackbird from 300 yards but, alas, was incapable of mastering a cellphone, he said, “If ya don’t mind me askin’, sir, what is it ya do for a livin’?” When I said that I was a retired Air Force officer and pilot he declared, “Allah be praised!” and fell in two steps behind me until we came to his boss.

  Each fine old olive tree that caught my eye looked at first like a unique grotesque; taken as a group, however, I saw that they all moved in harmony like figures in a melancholy painting. About the time the underappreciated baroque composer Viotti popped into my mind, I came face to face with Haluk Erçelik, who stood waiting for me in the doorway of the two-story stone house.

  He was tall and fit. I tried to associate this handsome man with the name of a particular movie star, but couldn’t. Then it came to me why. It was because, with his long silvery hair gathered at the nape of his neck and the perfect features of his proud face, he resembled nothing so much as a statue of Apollo.

  Actually those piercing green eyes might not have been so benevolent a gift from God. His tone was peremptory. He tried to reduce the tension of my surprise visit by donning a mock sincerity. The walls of the study we entered were covered with books. Bereket—Zakir’s wife, I assumed—offered home-made lemonade, her sidelong glances meanwhile betraying the fact that this was a house not used to lavish hospitality. I found myself suddenly missing Balat.

  When I disclosed to him the news about the $1.3 million something about the way he chuckled, like a person responding courteously to a clumsy anecdote, struck me. I tried to provoke a response by repeating word for word what his once-close friends had said.

  When he saw that I’d uttered my last sentence he put two fingers to his mouth and whistled. He didn’t open his mouth until Bereket appeared with a small bottle of raki, a glass of the turnip juice they drink with it in the south, and a bowl of nuts. As I awaited his next move the oil painting behind him caught my eye. Had that young, beautiful, and seemingly blind girl been eavesdropping on me? Was she now looking at me sympathetically?

  I relaxed as Haluk shut his eyes and took a long sip of raki. I guessed I was going to hear more than I’d bargained for.

  “When my father, a sailor from Hopa, on the Black Sea, married my mother, whom he’d met during his military service in Diyarbakir, they were disowned by both families. Their penniless friends took turns hosting them until eventually they found shelter in a rented flat in Balat. My father’s lifelong dream was to work with his cousin on long-haul cargo ships until he was thirty, and then open a fancy fish restaurant in Salacak on the Asian side of Istanbul. I was just five when the news arrived that he’d been killed in an accident at a South Asian port.

  “As a boy I was the mascot of the Balat streets. The lord of the district, Count Nadolsky, showed his affection for me by calling me belka—‘squirrel’ in Russian. His offer to become our benefactor shocked us at first. But my mother took over running his house, and slowly became attached to this White Russian who had saved us from going to live with my dictatorial grandfather.

  “His exiled majesty, who ordered me to call him Vlad Baba, was forty-six when he came into our life. He was a charming vagabond, energetic but also fickle. He looked after me well, yet on occasion would order me around like a lowly conscript. When he acquired Turkish citizenship after twenty years of sanctuary in Istanbul, he drew himself up as if he’d done us a favor. Once he was complimented on his Turkish by his favorite author, Peyami Safa, to which he replied, ‘You should hear my English and French.’ He was close to Istanbul’s consulate circles. He gave fencing and chess lessons to a few diplomats and taught foreign languages in the minority schools.

  “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 supporte
d 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.