Serpentine

by Thomas Thompson

  Often Marie-Andrée pressed to learn if he was still seeing May, and the answer was always a sharp “No.” But one afternoon following lunch at the apartment, Marie-Andrée followed him, and Charles proceeded directly to the shopping arcade where May was employed. As she watched them embrace, two possibilities occurred. One was to get the hell out of Bangkok, somehow, and back to Canada. The other was to stumble into a movie palace across the street and sit in the cold darkness and weep. Which she did.

  A new face appeared for dinner one night and Marie-Andrée at first mistook him to be a customer. He was an Indian from New Delhi named Ajay Chowdhury. He was polite, quiet, sexy, and devilishly handsome. Charles introduced him as “an old friend” but was not specific as to when and where they had met. Perhaps it had been an hour ago, perhaps five years. One never knew. Over the next few days, Ajay quickly moved in and became second-in-command and permanent shadow to Charles. Marie-Andrée gleaned a few bits of biographical detail. Ajay said he was the son of a Delhi foreign car importer whose life veered toward the upper class. Well educated, Ajay was an apparent ne’er-do-well who had dabbled in a dozen Delhi schemes—modeling, movie work, fashion, a hint of gigolo service when funds were low—but had failed in all. Now he was going into “partnership” with Charles, or Alain Gauthier, as he knew him, and the two men were inseparable. When they left the apartment together, Marie-Andrée’s heart stirred, for the two were a striking pair, both with lean, lithe bodies in tight trousers, perfectly sculptured hair, Ajay taller and seemingly stronger, but Charles clearly the commander-in-chief, proud to have such an attractive adjutant.

  And as the weeks crept by, Ajay was kind to Marie-Andrée. He sensed her despair and he always had a compliment for her food, or her appearance, or her looks, which the mirror told her were haggard and aging. If Charles noticed the attention Ajay paid to Marie-Andrée he did not remark on it. Probably he was glad to have another man pay court to the nagging Canadian woman. Or perhaps he had dispatched orders for Ajay to do so.

  In Istanbul, most of the city’s twenty thousand Jews live in a congested ghetto near the Galata Tower, known to tourists as the Fire Tower, a lighthouse of sorts that dates at least as far back as the Genoese era of the fourteenth century, possibly as early as a Roman emperor in the sixth century. For hundreds of years men were employed to stand watch twenty-four hours a day, looking for fires, an important task since sixty major fires have ravaged Istanbul to the point of total destruction in its history. The Fire Tower has been a prison and an astronomical observatory, and once, in the seventeenth century, a man strapped on eagle’s wings and, soaring hopefully off the summit, tried unsuccessfully to fly across the Bosporus.

  The Jews of Istanbul, clustered about the Fire Tower, make up but a small fraction of the city’s three million residents, but they are traditionally hard workers, respectable citizens, and dominant in commerce, science and engineering. Their existence up until the end of World War II was a tenuous one, their history recounting persecutions, fires set by arsonists that leveled their district, and the threat during 1943 that the Germans were planning to invade. At the last minute, Hitler changed plans and moved his forces to Bulgaria for entry into Russia. During the war, Jews were subject to a heavy tax levied specifically against them, and those who could not pay were exiled to a village in Anatolia.

  Today, Jews manage to live more or less unmolested in Istanbul, though their forty-three synagogues do not compare in grandeur to the 510 mosques, and their money is usually hidden. But, then, few visible signs of great wealth can be seen in Istanbul. The rich traditionally conceal their gold, and some of the wealthiest families in the city live on streets that also house beggars and toilet cleaners.

  Leon and Rachel Hakim were typical of the Sephardic Jews of Istanbul. Early in the twentieth century, he emigrated to the capital from a fishing village and at the age of twenty found hard labor as a pushcart peddler in the garment district. There he hawked his wares—cheap shirts, ties, scarves—in the crowded cobblestone streets that make the Sultan Hamam bazaar an impenetrable maze to the tourist. Hundreds of thousands of shoppers each day patronize the market, and within the air is ripe with the odors of great wheels of white feta cheese a yard across, of rich tobaccos and coffees, of newly slaughtered lambs dripping blood and hanging from hooks. In the vaulted recesses of the ceiling, doves fly about, sometimes darting down for a nervy theft of rice from the huge burlap bags of grocers.

  Leon Hakim married a shopgirl named Rachel, who bore him two sons and a daughter. Life progressed orderly and well for the Hakims, Leon working his way from the pushcart to stock boy for a shirtmaker, to tailor, and, finally, to ownership of his own business. He opened a shop in the bowels of the market, down one flight of stairs, then another, then zigzagging half a dozen more, where he sewed inexpensive suits, often for Anatolian workers for marriage or burial. Leon raised his family in the shadow of the Galata Fire Tower, and he obeyed the customs and traditions of the Jewish society that had endured for a millennium. To Leon Hakim, the most valuable currency of all was respect, and he lectured Rachel and the three children on its imperative nature. “We are nothing if we do not have the respect of our neighbors,” he often said. “If a man is president of Turkey and has not the respect of his people, then he is a failure.” Respect was best obtained by following the traditions of the centuries, staying within the boundaries of behavior laid down by the elders of the ancient tribe. Leon expected his children to be quiet, obedient, thrifty, industrious, and—that word again—respectful. His expectation was not unusual among the Jews of Istanbul. Long ago they learned that prudence dictated keeping a low profile and becoming so accomplished in certain fields of endeavor that their Jewishness would be tolerated.

  The first son, Israel, was of the mold and would one day become Mr. Solid Citizen, complete with pinstripe suit, a talent for business so blessed that the one family shop would swell to five, and a tranquil home life with wife and many children. And Leon and Rachel’s daughter, Rebecca, would walk on the same path of tradition and obeisance.

  Only the second son tore Leon’s heart and made him sit in shame among the elders and weep bitterly. The boy was Vitali—his name meant “life”—and not until he was twelve years old did he give off clues that he heard different melodies. Vitali was, in his formative years, normal, loving, obedient, in his place early for Friday night services and supper, and seemingly content even with the traditional stifling of Jewish youngsters in his community. He went to synagogue school for five years, earned good marks, and worked part-time at the family business. But on the precipice of manhood he stunned his parents by announcing, “I will not go to school anymore. I don’t want to study.” No amount of family persuasion, threats, and outrage could alter the boy’s stand. Just when Leon was at the breaking point and preparing to banish the recalcitrant son to a remote family village, the elder son, Israel, stepped forward as peacemaker.

  Israel had just opened his own tailor shop and proposed hiring his kid brother as errand boy. “He can learn the business, make a little money, and maybe the work will be so hard he would like to go back to school,” suggested Israel to his father, who waved a weary hand in agreement. He would do anything to dry Rachel’s tears, for she had been sobbing copiously since Vitali’s bombshell. “I don’t understand,” she wailed. “This boy is good, he is ours, he is in the family, why won’t he go to school and do like all good boys do?”

  Vitali worked for three years in the tailor shop, running errands, darting through the market and “borrowing,” as neatly as the doves an apple or a snitch of feta cheese from an otherwise busy merchant, pressing pants, learning to cut fabric. When Israel was inducted into the Turkish Army and was forced to turn his store over to a trusted friend to run in his absence, Vitali quit. He would not labor for a stranger. Now almost fifteen, he persuaded his father to send him to the mother country of Israel to live with distant relatives. That lasted for a time, then he returned to Istanbul. And back to Isra
el. And back and forth, coming and going, malcontent wherever he stopped during the middle teens of his life.

  In retrospect, the Hakim family believes Vitali “turned bad” when he fell under the influence of a boyhood friend. They met at a summer resort on an island near Istanbul, where over a long season they let their hair grow long, were introduced to hashish, put on American blue jeans, and boogied to Western rock and roll. When Vitali appeared at his parents’ home at the end of the summer in his new guise, Leon went straightaway to the temple to pray after helping his fainted wife to her bed.

  At the age of seventeen, Vitali told his brother that he was leaving Turkey for good, bound for Paris. His head was full of fantasies, a cheap commodity at the fleabag hotels near the Blue Mosque, where the hippies slept on rooftops in clouds of thick hashish. Israel knew that his brother had been spending too much time there, and he tried to reason with Vitali. If the boy fled to Paris, he was forfeiting the right to what was turning into a substantial family fortune. Their father was doing well enough to move his family out of the tiny flat in the ghetto into a luxurious apartment building which he purchased near the heart of the city. It had green marble windowsills and hardwood floors and a gleaming marble staircase washed daily by servants who strapped sopping wet towels to their feet and walked slowly up and down.

  “That doesn’t interest me,” said Vitali. “Istanbul is a dead end. Paris interests me. And maybe New York.”

  “But your life is in Istanbul,” Israel would remember saying. “The family is here, so you must be here. You are part of something that is bigger than you. No one has ever broken the family apart.”

  Vitali shook his head. He refused to stay in Turkey. He rejected a life controlled by ancient laws. He could not spend another day worrying about what some ancient “graybeards said three thousand years ago.”

  “What are you looking for?” pleaded Israel.

  “Freedom,” said Vitali.

  After that Vitali Hakim left Istanbul, mumbling words of love and apology to his mother, who was already dressed in black, and to his father, sitting dazed on the living room sofa. When the door slammed, he called out in a voice that echoed after his second son, down the washed marble staircase, “Why are you disgracing yourself and your family? We are good people. We have respect!”

  For a time, an occasional postcard drifted in from Paris, then London, finally New York, where Vitali played guitar at a night club in Greenwich Village and seemed to be living with a girl named Hannah, who studied white magic and made shawls embroidered with ancient symbols. Scant information was to be found on the postcards, rarely more than “Am enjoying New York. Cold and snow coming. Love, your son.” But Rachel treasured each card, reading them, kissing them, keeping them locked in a box that she kept at the back of her armoire. Leon feigned disinterest, but Rachel knew he waited as eagerly as she for the next meager dispatch. Six years slowly slipped away.

  One afternoon in the early 1970s, a surprise telephone call ruptured the orderly routine of Leon and Rachel Hakim’s home. Their long absent son, Vitali, was at the Istanbul airport. He faced a long layover between planes. Would his parents receive him for a brief visit? Rachel dropped the phone in tears, falling to her knees in grateful prayer. Leon grabbed the receiver and shouted welcome, then asked if Vitali could come to the apartment after sunset, so that neighbors would not see the prodigal son. Vitali was not offended; he laughed and agreed. But when, under the cover of darkness, he arrived, Vitali discovered both of his parents waiting at the curb, eager to smother him with kisses and hugs. A feast was waiting upstairs. Rachel proudly looked up at the windows of the apartment building on the ancient street in Istanbul and knew that the neighbors were looking down at the homecoming. “My son!” she cried. “My son is home.”

  Vitali only stayed for a few hours, explaining that he had important business in Spain and could not dally in Turkey no matter how much he enjoyed visiting with his parents. They were gravely disappointed, but Leon had spent much of the day warning his wife that the boy would be different, that six years would have wrought considerable change in the thin teen-ager who left home so long ago. Vitali now wore his hair long. It fell on his shoulders. His mustache was not neatly trimmed in the fashion of Turkish businessmen, but thick and sweeping and fierce. He was a little overweight, with a potbelly, but his chest and arms were thickly muscled. One earlobe bore a gold ring, and around his neck hung necklaces. His shirt was printed with astrological signs. He spoke of the many things he had done—cabaret performer, magician (he made Turkish cigarettes appear from behind his mother’s ears), poet, tour guide in Paris. He could speak English now, and French, and pretty fair Spanish. He was going into the “import-export” business and would stand to make millions within a few years if his plans were realized. He was funny and tender and loving, and when he was gone—as abruptly as he had come—Rachel felt as if she had been blown about by a storm, but one whose force she would gladly bear again. Leon sat at the window of the building he owned and watched the taxi take his son away. He sat there for a long time, before Rachel tenderly insisted that he take his soft tears to bed.

  Several more years passed. Leon Hakim grew heavy and gray and even richer. His wife, conversely, grew frail and spent most of her time in religious activities. Grandchildren filled their lives. They were looked up to in the Jewish community of Istanbul and men made deference to the Hakims when they walked together on the streets. Rarely did anyone speak Vitali’s name. The boy, wherever he was, was nearly thirty. Israel, the Hakims’ older son, had received one sorrowful piece of information, but he did not share it with his parents. A police report came to his attention that indicated Vitali had been arrested in Spain on a drug charge. Apparently a substantial quantity of hashish and cocaine had been discovered in his possession. But as it was a first offense, Vitali was not sent to prison. Israel debated with himself for some time before deciding that the old people simply could not bear this news.

  Ibiza, the sun-washed island in the western Mediterranean off the coast of Spain, counted among its crops, in the early 1970s, dried apricots and figs, salt removed from seawater, magnificent fish for the kettles of Madrid and Barcelona, and “hippies.” Few of the thousands of young people who flocked to the island were hippies in the classic sense, but any young person who arrived in Ibiza with longish hair, a backpack, and an air of non-commitment to anything save the sun and exotic cigarettes was immediately categorized and often hassled by the police.

  This is not to say there were no dark shadows on the island. Ibiza was a magic center for the sale and purchase of drugs. Historically, smugglers enjoyed its strategic position. Rumor often suggests that to this day white slavers operate about the port, engaging down-and-out Western women to serve as “au pair girls” in Arab countries. Not until the contract is signed and the destination reached do the girls supposedly discover they have been sold into prostitution.

  Among the young women of Ibiza in 1975 was a quiet and talented French girl named Charmayne Carrou, who had come to the island in search of the sun and who had stayed to try and establish a dressmaking business. Charmayne was clever with her needle and sketches, and she was enchanted by the bright Spanish cottons that could be fashioned into billowing blouses and long hostess skirts, with buttons made from bits of shells or fragments of topaz. It was her intention to sell the creations at beach boutiques, but after months of failing to establish a merchandising outlet, Charmayne was not only unhappy but broke.

  Originally Charmayne had come to Ibiza at the invitation of a distant cousin, Zazi, who was the family scandal. More or less disowned in Paris, Zazi was living unmarried with a drug dealer in Ibiza and was celebrated for parties that were considered failures if anyone went home before dawn. Charmayne’s parents were worried when their daughter went away to visit Zazi, but they were reasonably sure that the values they had taught Charmayne would help her resist the temptations of Zazi’s hedonism.

  In the larger sense, they wer
e right. Charmayne had little use for drugs, save an occasional puff at a marijuana cigarette, and she had no interest at all in selling grass on the beach—as Zazi once suggested. Charmayne believed in the ethic of work, honest work, and she was not even sexually promiscuous in a community where it was almost de rigueur. One night, dining with Zazi and the drug dealer, who was quickly falling out of favor, Charmayne mentioned that her dress business was a flop—and that she was bereft of funds. Sadly, she could see only one road open—a return to Paris.

  Dressing her face in best “I told you so” expression, Zazi repeated her oft-remarked belief that Ibiza was a land where the fruits of opportunity fairly fell from the trees. Yet Charmayne was so stupid she went hungry. Fortunes were waiting to be made on this island! As Zazi orated, she lolled on soft, plump cushions from where she conducted business, slept, and made love to a variety of partners. On her arms and about her neck were several pounds of gold jewelry. Recently she had taken to wearing clown-white makeup with rouge circles on her cheeks. The effect was weird, but then, so was Zazi. She also played, expertly, a small harp and liked to be encountered posing, as models did for the old masters’ portraits of courtesans.