Many and Many a Year Ago

by Selcuk Altun

  “We walked toward Broadway, which was flowing like the Amazon, and I considered stretching out my hand for the forbidden fruit. We went into a café named Artwin and I remember praying, ‘Please let her turn out to be stupid so that I can just drink a cup of coffee and get away.’ But I was already under her spell. Born twenty-two years earlier in Buenos Aires, Rosalba Anna-Graziella Martinez was unpretentious and enchanting. She had a sense of humor. About Istanbul she said, ‘Isn’t that where they made Aladdin’s carpet?’ She exuded self-confidence and wore simple but chic clothes. I can still describe what she had on that day, down to the buttons on her blouse. She was perfectly aware that she was shaking me to the core with her straightforward language and the twinkle in her eye.

  “On our second date we watched a romantic movie at a musty theater in Spanish Harlem. By the third date, as I kissed her goodnight on the cheek, I was sure I’d found the love of my life. We began meeting like high-school kids smitten with puppy love. Sundays always meant the movies. We walked the back streets hand in hand, and if she felt like whistling a tune I felt like I was floating in the air. Twice a week or more I was at Cabaña las Violetas. If I said to her, ‘Don’t raise your left leg so high, people can see your underwear,’ she would raise it higher with a coy look. I can still see it.

  “She had had to break off her training in ballet to look after her twin siblings when her father died of a heart attack. I was twenty-seven and my family was already tense with the effort of finding me a suitable Jewish bride with a satisfactory dowry. About the time my mother wanted me to meet the daughter of a diamond wholesaler on 47th Street, Rosalba’s troupe was on the point of leaving for Chicago. Telling my mother I had a lover was a relief to me, even though she cried and beat her thighs like a Muslim woman. When my father got the news, he wasn’t slow to deliver an ultimatum: leave the girl or leave home immediately! Next morning as I packed my belongings I felt like a prisoner who’s received the surprising news that he’s been freed.

  “I moved in with my pal Bernie Jacobsen, who worked at the Chemical Bank. My mother’s efforts as a go-between proved futile, and my father disowned me. As an undergraduate at N.Y.U. I’d been a scholarship student, so I still had some of the money left that Baruch Shapiro had earmarked for my education. When my father’s secretary brought it to me, she informed me in tears that I was no longer welcome in my father’s presence, even at his funeral. Rosalba, who spent the spring working in Chicago and Detroit, was amazed at my ordeal. If I was job-hunting in New York two days a week, I was running after her the rest of the time. We planned to get married as soon as I found a decent job. If I wanted my future wife to stop dancing in front of those haughty young men, my salary would have to support her family in Buenos Aires.

  “I founded a go-between company called Black Beauty Ltd. and became Nasu’s New York representative. Puerto Rican Julio, who played matchmaker to Rosalba and me, said on his first day as my employee, ‘I’ll bring luck to you.’ We did good business in a market where certain unscrupulous Japanese organizations were passing off painted stones as black pearls. We multiplied our profits by living up to our promises about quality and quantity. When I married Rosalba in 1952, I had an apartment on Park Avenue and the latest Dodge sedan. But my wife didn’t feel completely at home in the richest district of New York, and her first pregnancy resulted in miscarriage. Just as she was starting to pull herself together she was devastated by the news that one of her twin brothers had drowned in the Río Plata. We traveled to Buenos Aires; she couldn’t leave her depressed mother for months. The next three years of traveling between New York and Buenos Aires left her exhausted. In her absences I followed Shizoku’s advice and went to South Asia in search of precious stones. For a while, at least, the profits I made were embarrassing to me, especially those I made at the expense of distressed maharajahs. I was thirty-two and rich when our son Salvador was born in our Buenos Aires house. My travel on the United States-South Asia-Argentina triangle intensified when my wife finally decided that she could no longer bear to leave Buenos Aires. Rosalba attributed the lack of friction in our marriage to these continual separations. Her capacity for compromise and her unassuming attitude enabled her to manage me and her problematic mother for years.

  “Our daughter Daniela was forty days old when my father died in the summer of 1958. In keeping with his will, my mother refused to see me. She was ninety by the time I managed to get admitted to her presence, and then she confused me with Musa, the son of the imam who was our neighbor in Balat.

  “‘Musa,’ my mother said to me on her hundredth birthday, ‘if you see Gerda, tell her I’m tired of waiting for a letter.’

  “She never spoke again, but turned into a kind of radiant statue. I’ve come to like her saintly disposition. I enjoy sitting at her side once every three months when I visit her in New York. She strokes my cheek and whispers Old Testament verses to me, and I recall the ezans I used to hear in Balat.

  “In the summer of 1960 I went to French Polynesia, where they’d begun the experimental production of black pearls. They told me that black pearls were troublesome to produce but that the start-up cost was not terribly prohibitive. I took special note of two critical steps in the process: the injecting of ‘seeds’ into the oysters that were then lowered into the ocean with special nets, and the impeccable care lavished on them for more than eighteen months underwater. So first I founded a company called ‘Noir Est Noir’, then I set up a processing plant on Mangareva Island. I brought in Japanese professionals but couldn’t put together a competent local team to take care of the underwater maintenance. Only when I had a synagogue built on the island to attract Ethiopian Jewish divers was my destiny realized of becoming the world’s leading black pearl producer. The cost of a single large and flawless Type A black pearl starts at a $1,000, and there will never be a lack of women willing to pay $30,000 to get on a two-year waiting list for a small pearl necklace. I was nudging the billionaire level by the age of fifty-four, the year of the heart attack that I concealed from my wife. I gradually reduced my work load, and when Salvador came onto the scene I gave up all the routine chores.

  “Rosalba and I went to Europe after her mother died, and I returned to the country of my birth after forty years. Most of my relatives were dead and the rest were scattered to the four corners of the earth.

  “Rosalba really liked hearing the ezan and seeing Arnavutköy and the Mihrimah Sultan mosque at Edirnekapı in Istanbul, and meeting the İzmir people who called her ‘Auntie.’ She never interfered with my work. I began to fear for her psychological health, though, because she never wanted to change her style or her philosophy even though she was married to perhaps the richest man in Argentina. I almost grew used to the way her uneasiness rose in proportion to the rise in my wealth. The last two things that brought her happiness, I suppose, were Daniela’s graduation as an honors student from the Düsseldorf College of Music and her subsequent appointment to a cellist’s chair on the Boston Symphony Orchestra. My wife didn’t see her seventieth birthday. I was on a business trip to Tahiti with my son when we lost her. They said she’d been struggling with an incurable ovarian tumor. Apparently she’d mentioned this to her daughter six months earlier but to nobody else, because she didn’t want to spoil the happiness the family had enjoyed for ten years.

  “I thought it would ease my pain if I threw myself into my work again, but it was useless. I never forgave myself for spending all those days without her for the sake of my financial ambitions. My respect for my wife increased with her death, yet I was immersed in guilt. In her honor I shut myself up in this soulless building. I’ve never succeeded even in throwing away her handkerchiefs. Some days I go twice to visit her grave at the Recoleta Cemetery. She used to be frightened by thunder; now whenever I hear thunder I get goose bumps. Now that she’s gone, my secret paradise Mangareva just annoys me. I never leave Recoleta except to visit my mother. She made me laugh the last time I saw her, after I’d completed my wife’s ma
usoleum. ‘Musa,’ she whispered in my ear, ‘have you been circumcised?’

  “Yesterday was the anniversary of Rosalba’s death. I’ve confessed to you what I haven’t been able to tell my insensitive fifty-year-old son. Your face eases the heart and your eyes do not judge. If you’ve brought news from heaven, tell me. What do you want from this poor Roditi, my countryman?”

  Moved by his story, I related the story of Esther and Ali.

  “Eli’s grandmother and mine were cousins,” he said. “People used to call Eli, who had nothing going for him except his good looks, ‘the actor.’ It was a bit of a joke to me when he approached me on my fortieth birthday with a proposal to become my business partner. He wouldn’t listen to reason, and he took serious offense when I said no. I hardly knew him! We would nod to each other from a distance if we happened to see each other, but that was all. It wasn’t difficult to see that he and his elegant wife were a poor match. Losing money would have been avoidable if he hadn’t mixed with the wrong people. It was said that he was the most handsome and the least talented Jew in Argentina’s long immigration history.

  “It took seven years for him to cross my path again. One evening as I was getting into my car to go home, he opened the door and sat down in the front seat and started crying. That was when I learned that he was in partnership with an Armenian jeweler from Istanbul. He begged for a loan to replace what he’d taken secretly from the safe and lost on the stock market. I knew he’d never keep his promise, and he didn’t, but two years later he got me again with a note he sent to my table at a business lunch. This time it was his daughter. If he failed to pay her tuition immediately she was going to be expelled from her private school. I gave him the money and told him, ‘From now on, the only help you can expect from me is paying for your funeral expenses.’ He didn’t even feign embarrassment.

  “I felt sympathetic toward Stella, who looked like her paternal grandmother. She had a little temper and a lot of attractiveness. I hired her to work in my public relations office, where she stayed until she became Miss Argentina. She always took her father’s side when her parents argued and so eventually became distanced from her mother. Her second marriage was to an Australian diplomat, and when she came to say goodbye, she vowed never to set foot in this town again.

  “I kept my promise to Eli when I took care of his funeral expenses after the accident twenty years ago. Esther appeared more grief-stricken during the funeral than I’d expected. Nobody saw her after that; but if she’d died, I would have heard about it. If it’s any help, you can take it to the bank that that headstrong İzmir woman would never chase after her daughter. Once I met Eli’s old partner, Dikran Gumushian, and remembered that my father never let me play with the Armenian kids. He told me that Eli had suffered a psychological breakdown and was dealing in used cars. Dikran is a likeable man. If he’s still alive he would be about seventy-five. You might find out more about Esther if you ask around among the jewelers at Libertad. Interestingly, Dikran and Esther behaved as if they were quite close friends at Eli’s funeral …”

  After a brief but adequate silence I thanked him and politely requested permission to take my leave. He insisted on giving me a brooch of black pearls in a glittering box. “This ruinous object will be locked up eventually in some woman’s jewelry box,” he said. “And for you, my countryman, I have a message: A man who has never had an unforgettable woman in his life has not lived, but merely existed on this earth.”

  We were both surprised when I kissed the weary hand that he stretched out and laid on my forehead. His eyes filled with tears and I quickly took refuge in the elevator.

  Ariel was sitting at the bar in the lobby of the Alvear Palace reading Samuel Beckett’s Ill Seen, Ill Said. It seemed to me that he disapproved of my seeing Izak Roditi without him.

  “Did you know that this is the year of Beckett’s one hundredth birthday?” he said.

  “Did you know that ‘Godot’ was coined from ‘God’ and ‘idiot’?” I said.

  We visited the Recoleta Cemetery before commencing our search for Dikran the jeweler. I felt no nostalgia for Z. when I beheld the tableau vivante created by the marble tombs of Recoleta. Avoiding the commotion caused by tourists trying to get their pictures taken next to Evita’s monument, we came to Roditi’s wife’s place of eternal rest. It was a jet-black pyramid. Her effigy was inscribed on each side. Ariel translated the lines on the side facing the street; I was sure they were borrowed from a Turkish poet:

  Your absence is the other name of hell.

  I’m cold, I’m shivering. Don’t close your eyes.

  Libertad had lost its old dynamism; the perpetual economic crisis had caused links in the caravan of jewelers to be broken. The obstinate middle-aged Armenian caretaker we spoke to said he’d never heard of a Dikran Gumushian. Then I remembered Dr. Kaltakian. We rushed to Ariel’s office and bookstore to call him. The bookstore was as tightly organized as a military archive and smelled strangely of hay. I reached Dr. Armando Kaltakian on the fourth attempt. He sounded glad to hear that I needed his help. “If I can’t call you with the information you want in two hours, I’ll fax it to your hotel this evening,” he said. I decided to take a stroll along Corrientes.

  As I emerged onto the spacious avenue I felt the same sense of relief I used to feel when math classes were over. I wandered along accompanied by gentle gusts of wind. Was this a mirage, or was I seeing in this faraway land shops that I knew window by window? Were these the cinemas and theaters that were etched into my memory by years of movie-going? Like Anatolia, the streets were saturated with people walking as if they were playing parts in a pantomime behind a giant lace curtain. I walked to the head of the street, where a musician in an orange velvet jacket had situated himself. His legs were amputated below the knees and, if you ask me, he was willfully murdering the melody of “Over the Rainbow” with his harmonica. I poured all the coins in my pocket into the tango hat in front of him, and he thanked me by winking at me twice. I entered the desolate café behind him and sobered up on bad coffee brought to me by a waitress who thought that Istanbul was the capital of Egypt.

  I went back to the bookstore, but gazing at the shelves of tired books was making me sleepy. I selected Las Poemas de Edgar Poe and felt satisfied to have filled a gap in the library I never touched. I wasn’t surprised when Ariel didn’t give me a discount. As I was imagining a competition for the most attractive cover among the complete works of Nobel Prize-winning Jews, a fax message arrived:

  Brother Kemal,

  Master Dikran will be at a café called Confitería Ideal tomorrow morning at eleven o’clock. I tried describing your features to him but he said there was no need. He is from Istanbul and can spot a young Turkish fellow by the way he walks into a room.

  Good luck.

  Dr. A.K.

  As Ariel was dropping me off at the hotel, he told me how he had met a Turkish bibliophile.

  “I didn’t think he would know about the rare book dealers here. Anyway, he was middle-aged and looked like an Italian, though with a surly face. He said he wrote novels and essays under a pseudonym. His Spanish was more satisfactory than that of the Boca Juniors football players. He told me, ‘Whenever the name Borges is pronounced, I think of Dali.’ He’d been to a town in Patagonia whose name he wouldn’t tell me. But he didn’t mind telling me why he was here: he had bought the first volume of Aulus Gellius’s Attic Nights, translated into English in 1795, from an Istanbul dealer last year. This book was actually, as the naïve dealer arrogantly confided, a $3 acquisition from the nephew of a White Russian who died at the age of 105. According to an inscription dated 19 September 1908 on the title page, the book belonged to a Constance Radcliffe who worked at the British embassy in Istanbul. It contained numerous passages underlined in Indian ink. When these were combined, they formed a message:

  I can no longer tolerate the burden of the sin laid on me. I want to shake off the curse of this secret that will change the history books.

/>   If Markham and Unsworth at Burlington Arcade (London) still stands, you are not too late.

  Take this book there. You will be rewarded with the second volume.

  “So he goes to London. Markham and Unsworth at Piccadilly is now a fountain-pen boutique. The owner of the shop, who’s in his eighties, says, ‘I suppose I don’t have the right to ask you why you are so late?’ and hands him the second volume, which he has removed from a wall safe. The original title of this cultural touchstone, which comprises three volumes in English, is Noctes Atticae. Aulus Gellius wrote it in the second century A.D. while living in Athens. It was obvious that he, who did not care to say any more, was set to go to Patagonia with the fresh clue. I didn’t ask him about his pseudonym. But in my latest dream—about as long as an MTV video—I saw you escaping from a novel that he wrote and trying to take shelter in the novel he was about to write …”

  I managed to extricate myself from the paranoid book dealer and went back to the hotel and fell into a deep sleep after drinking two beers I found in the mini-bar. Later, as we had dinner in his room, Professor Ali complained about how his enthusiasm for translation had diminished along with his pain. It was a great surprise to me that he bewailed his beloved’s disappearance instead of rejoicing at the good news that she was still alive somewhere.