by Selcuk Altun
“Come three steps closer and wait for my decision like a good soldier,” she replied, in a voice that seemed to have gained volume. Squinting, she stretched her arms toward me and said, “You’re neither as handsome as Samsun described nor as ugly as my grandfather implied.” I hugged her like she was cotton candy and didn’t let her go until the nurse warned me. The pure and genuine light in her eye scattered all the dark clouds inside me. That revitalizing green was enough for me. I said, “You look like you’ve put on new make-up, Sim. It becomes you very well.”
In order to maintain the precision of her sight, the clinic wanted to keep Sim two more days for observation. I called our dearest friends, beginning with her grandfather, to bring them up to date. I left Sami until last. When I came to him, I said, “Sami, you’re nothing but an indecent soothsayer. When I get back I may decide to settle our accounts for my fiancée’s unopened left eye by closing one of yours.”
We stayed in Boston for five more days, attending the clinic every morning. I knew Sim wouldn’t utter any clichés about her joyful recovery, and I was glad of that. As we wandered the city she didn’t let go of my right hand, and if she forgot herself and clung to my arm, we smiled at each other ruefully. We took the metro from our hotel to one of the most luxurious malls in town, where Sim leafed through almost every magazine in the bookstore. I rejoiced to watch her looking at the paintings and sculptures in the Boston Museum of Fine Art and the Isabella S. Gardner Museum. She was reluctant to leave the splendid New England Aquarium, saying, “Sharks are wonders of design.”
“Sim needs two more examinations a week apart. You can go to New York as long as you’re back here on Wednesday afternoons,” Dr. Cooper told us. Kamil Polat was going to Buffalo for a conference, so his high-school daughter Türkay hosted us on our last night in Boston. The young woman looked as if she hadn’t fully enjoyed her childhood. This observation took me back to L., whereupon I realized I hadn’t even thought about my mother. We were off to the Charles Playhouse to see a mime performance. As we turned into Warrenton Street, which lived its days and nights all in the same gray tones, Türkay said, “Edgar Allan Poe was born in a house on this street.” And as we took our seats in the theatre I remembered that Sim’s eye operation had taken place on Poe’s birthday. I refrained, however, from constructing a complex theory around this. Suat’s marionettes had fulfilled their duties and we had all reached a happy cinematic ending together. I assumed that he had no more expectations of me. My deeper anxiety was for Sim, who thought that it was I who was her savior—an assumption far more worrying than her growing attachment.
*
In New York we acted like a carefree honeymoon couple. I patiently escorted Sim to famous stores and museums whose names I forgot instantly. In the evenings, if we had time to spare from Broadway musicals, we went to concerts at Lincoln Center. When she saw Picasso’s “The Blind Man’s Meal” at the Metropolitan Museum, my fiancée sighed like a repentant sinner who’s run into his unrepentant partner in crime. There were constant queues of people snaking out of shops where they sold coffee like lime juice. I missed Balat.
Sim’s favorite university professor Selime Hanım was now working at the Baltimore Museum of Art. We were due to go and see her on Sunday.
We caught the train at Penn Station, which resembled an ant’s nest. Selime and her husband met us in Baltimore. Selime was a wide-eyed, charming brunette. Her plump banker husband’s excessively subservient attitude toward his wife discomfited me, although I had yet to be disturbed by his exaggerated hospitality. He took us on a tour of the city in his Cadillac. To me Baltimore resembled the set of a psychological thriller, and the Baltimoreans were actors unhappy with their pay. We were sipping our coffees at the Inner Harbor, when Doug said, “Well, I don’t blame you if you don’t like Baltimore—it’s under the curse of Edgar Allan Poe.” (The conceit of living in the city where Poe was buried and being indifferent to it.)
We had lunch at the museum where Selime worked. Actually the Baltimore Museum of Art, with its famous Matisse collection, bored me. (I couldn’t, of course, tell them that if I saw one Matisse I felt like I’d seen them all.) My fiancée wanted to stay longer, so Selime assigned her husband to entertain me in town. I could hardly believe how easily the words spilled out of my mouth when I asked Doug to take me to Poe’s grave.
There was a theory that Poe had been attacked by religious fanatics when he was found on a Baltimore back street struggling for his life in 1849. Even if this theory were false, it was possible that his soul wouldn’t have appreciated this memorial with the caricature-like relief of Poe carved on it. I underlined two sentences that I read twice in Frommer’s Maryland and Delaware, which I’d picked up before boarding the train:
After his death as his relatives were preparing his grave a train derailed and hit his headstone, alone of those in the cemetery. And every 19 January, one of his admirers visits his grave and leaves half a bottle of cognac and three red roses.
(Ah, the pleasant glow stirred by coming across Suat Altan’s trail in a guidebook!) The small, not to say boutique, cemetery of Westminster Church, situated at a busy intersection, reminded me of the graveyards of our neighborhood mosques. Doug, sensing that I wasn’t overwhelmed, proposed to take me to the Poe museum. The lack of desire in his voice increased mine.
The squat two-story building had belonged to Poe’s aunt, and it was during his stay here from 1835 to 1837 that he fell in love with Virginia Clemm. The unskillfully polished bricks made the miniscule museum look like a toy building. N. Amity street had long since become an African-American neighborhood. The youngsters standing around looked like mannequins brought in to lure visitors to the museum with their bright-eyed looks. The rooms inside were as claustrophobic as solitary-confinement cells.
I was stuck in front of a notice on the bulletin board. A headline in large print proclaimed, “Greatest Literary Prize After the Nobel,” and under it was an announcement that a “first novel” competition—with a first prize of $200,000—had been organized in honor of the bicentennial of Poe’s birthday in 2009. The deadline for entries (not to exceed 60,000 words) was 19 January 2008. In my opinion the name of the sponsor was as exciting as the grand prize.
I wrote down the address of the NEVAR Foundation in my guidebook. The word “NEVAR” was more than simply the reverse of the title of Poe’s poem “The Raven,” which had brought him fame. In Turkish it meant “What’s up?” The phrase rang distant bells even for Doug, whose father had been the director of a global medical company in Istanbul for five years. I had no time to waste; my mysterious benefactor was summoning me.
As soon as we got back to New York I got on the hotel’s Internet. NEVAR was a foundation newly established to support research on Edgar Allan Poe. I wasn’t surprised to find the founders’ names unmentioned. Next morning I called the foundation to speak to the person in charge. I nearly said, “Ne var?” instead of “Good morning.”
“Who’s calling?” asked an authoritative female voice.
“I’m a friend of Suat Altan from Istanbul,” I said.
A new voice came on the phone, claiming to be Dr. Rodney Quinn, who probably thought he could get rid of me by saying, “There’s nobody of that name working here.”
“I’m pretty sure that Suat Altan does work there, Dr. Quinn,” I said. “But he would be the founder.”
“I’m not authorized to give out the names of our founders, nor to take messages for them,” he said. His response obviously contained coded congratulations on discovering Suat’s trail.
“I’ll send him a fax today in Turkish,” I said. “If you have nothing to do with Mr. Altan then you can tear it up.”
As soon as Sim retired for a nap, I found a piece of hotel stationery and eagerly set to work. The rest of it was taken over by my right hand.
Dear Suat,
I’m writing to thank you, though I don’t know how exactly to express my gratitude and how to express my ingratitude. In any ca
se you’re a man who likes ambivalence.
You are a dangerously intelligent and powerful man, yet a benign master of ceremonies. If you weren’t, I would have abandoned the game as soon as I realized that Suat and Fuat are one and the same; and that you were actually using the house you gave me as a kind of laboratory.
Because of the unsigned letter you sent, a saintly man was reunited with his long-lost but never-forgotten beloved.
Because of the clues provided by the so-called lawyer you sent, a young girl was brought back to life and I was given a reason to live again.
Perhaps you’re proud of how your puppets performed, but I pray to you as our Eros and miracle-working physician.
I hesitate to tell you how I tracked you down. I’m under the impression that you know everything anyway.
We’ll be back in Istanbul in a week and I will marry my fiancée at the first opportunity. I’ll name my first child after you, whether it’s a boy or a girl.
You will call me one day …
Sincerely,
Kemal Kuray
My hastily scribbled letter was flowing through the fax lines of the hotel and I was experiencing the satisfaction of paying my spiritual debts, but I couldn’t stop myself from reading through what I’d written.
*
Contented with Sim’s last check-up, Dr. Carl Cooper let us go for six months.
We were leaving for Istanbul in three days. Banu Tanalp’s fellow academic and artist friend Peter Hristoff had taken my fiancée to visit the School of Visual Arts where he teaches.
There was a pleasant bite in the air outside, but I was hooked on the classical music station a black taxi driver told me about the night before. Last night, at a pizzeria named Angelos, I had tried to explain to Sim the Suat Altan concept. I’d have felt better about it if she hadn’t had a smile playing on her lips the whole time.
I got up to look at the distant ocean that hung outside my window like a travel poster. The message button on the phone was blinking nervously, so I went down to the lobby. There were two blue envelopes inside the large orange one the courier handed me. I recognized the handwriting immediately, and was climbing Jacob’s ladder. A check fell out of the embossed envelope; I couldn’t look at the figure. In the other one was a letter and color photocopies of two photographs. I was devastated to see Suat and Fuat as children standing hand in hand.
The letter read:
Commander,
I’ve gone no further than to make a sincere gesture on behalf of someone who is for me a brilliant paragon but also a friend suffering misfortune. If you received an unsigned note, or were visited by a phony lawyer, it was not I who sent them.
I have good reason not to be seen in the open. One day I’ll come to see my namesake.
Your friend,
Suat
Tired of pacing up and down, I pressed my face and arms to the window. I singled out “five new tricksters”, and I didn’t care whether they worked independently or as a team. I didn’t worry about who had sent the unsigned note or the deceptive lawyer. Suddenly two balloons, one red and the other blue, appeared in the sky. They flew over the tops of the skyscrapers and disappeared from view. My right hand began to itch sweetly, and I went down again to the lobby. There I exchanged a dollar tip to the doorman for the address of the nearest stationery store. At Staples I bought a thick spiral notebook, a dozen pencils, and an eraser.
The first-novel contest sponsored by NEVAR, in honor of Poe, was not something that I could avoid entering. It was only eleven months until 19 January 2009, but I knew what I would write. Perhaps Ken Melling had been sent by fate—or someone else—to the flat below mine just to translate my novel. I opened the notebook and wrote the title in capital letters: MANY AND MANY A YEAR AGO.
Muttering a Bismillah, I turned to the first page. From here on in I would be unable to meddle in the work of my right hand:
What is to come will not cause us to mourn for what is gone, says my inner voice. Should I trust it? Does eluding death mean losing the will to live? Is it a reward or punishment? My inner voice warned me once too about my passion for music. It was when I was five and lost in a solo on that unearthly flute, the ney. Turning to my aunt, I said, “It’s Allah Baba talking, isn’t it?”
