The Lamppost Diary

by Agop J. Hacikyan

  Papa was swearing. He swore in Turkish when his rage exhausted his reserve of Armenian swear words. He looked for Tomas. He was with Mama; Noni and her mother were walking beside him. Among the crowd, despite the darkness, Tomas spotted their neighbour’s son, Seth, the chubby-cheeked boy. He was darting back to their apartment building with his parents. In a way, the basement of their building was much safer and far more comfortable than the official shelter, where people could be asphyxiated before a bomb hit. Seth was dressed as if returning from a wedding or bar mitzvah.

  Tomas fixed his eyes on the crowd. Anya should be somewhere in there, if she weren’t already at the shelter. After a few very tense minutes he picked out her blonde hair illuminating the darkness. She was with her parents at the head of the crowd. They were hurrying back like the rest. Tomas flew to join her.

  Someone in the crowd yelled, ‘That son of a bitch!’

  Tomas thought the man was shouting at him and stopped, but apparently the man’s anger was directed at someone by the name of Fehmi.

  ‘I paid Fehmi, the bastard! I paid him a bundle to save me a place in case of an air raid. He hasn’t even showed up!’

  Fehmi was apparently the owner of the furniture shop.

  Another voice, equally vexed, echoed, ‘He did the same to me. The son of a whore should give us our money back.’

  The outraged booing filled the air. The two men were well-known Armenian wheeler-dealers. Everybody was aware of their reputation: questionable transactions, black-marketing in provisions, gas and other essentials such as opium and heroin. Each of them had amassed a fortune that would last until the next millennium. This was wartime – the law of the jungle reigned supreme. And the expressions ‘war profiteer’ and ‘war-rich’ had become part of the everyday vocabulary.

  Tomas reached Anya and grabbed her hand.

  ‘How did you find me?’

  Tomas was conscious of her parents’ presence.

  ‘I recognized your hair.’

  Anya’s mother asked worriedly, ‘Do your parents know you’re here?’

  ‘Yes, of course ...’ He lied more convincingly than a seasoned litigator.

  Before they arrived at their building the sirens stopped. Instead of going to their apartments, the tenants headed down to the basement. No one was taking any chances. Not that anyone was that worried anymore, except for Oryort Angèle’s mother and Digin Antaram, whose hair was undone, lips clenched and eyelids swollen; she sobbed and crossed herself continuously.

  The stairs to the basement were dark, and the automatic control kept turning the lights off every thirty seconds. The basement was darker still. There were only a couple of dusty blue bulbs hanging from the ceiling. For the children it was a unique opportunity to stay up and play hide-and-seek and, for Tomas and Anya, a godsend. Parents chided their youngsters to keep it down. They warned them the noise might attract enemy planes, and the children shouted louder than before.

  Despite their long anxious search, Tomas’s parents said nothing when they found him. Tomas was pleasantly surprised. But he thought it must be a subterfuge: the offence would be brought against him on an occasion yet to come.

  The basement consisted of a fairly big laundry room with a cement floor and a long marble washbasin large enough for a herd of cattle to drink from. Since the beginning of the war the room, while still used for laundering, had been converted into an emergency bunker. The only way it differed from its pre-war years was the addition of a black blind to the iron-grilled window and the two blue 60-watt bulbs. Behind the stairwell there were storage compartments like big wooden cages, one for each apartment, and the quarters of the janitor, Arto, and his wife Elmonik. These comprised a tiny kitchen and a room used as a sitting room during the day and a bedroom at night – after the ten o’clock news had poured out of the old Zenith radio with buttons larger than wooden darning eggs.

  Arto and Elmonik were Armenian. In spite of his advanced age the husband took care of the building. His wife swept and washed the stairs and the pavement in front of the building once a day and twice on rainy days, and polished the brass doorknobs on every floor. The latter was her favourite activity. Arto, his jowls hanging like two large pieces of shrunken tripe, was as permanent as the building itself. Elmonik, on the other hand, was a small skinny woman, much younger than her husband. She resembled a leafless bush. She laughed frequently for no reason. Most of the tenants said she was being tickled by demons.

  The unexpected air raid was a blessing for the couple. They had been waiting and praying for it ever since the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939. The basement was instantly transformed into a neighbourhood café. Elmonik served Turkish coffee and tea to the adults and lemonade and lokum to the children. Her husband brought tavlas, backgammon sets and playing cards. Many, though, were not in the mood for playing at four o’clock in the morning under threat of attack. Tomas and Anya deftly slipped towards the storage section, isolating themselves in a corner. In no time cigarette smoke hung heavy in the air like a large patch of cloud auguring rain.

  After sobbing continuously like a noisy vacuum cleaner with missing parts, Angèle’s mother passed out in her chair. Angèle caught her in time to prevent her from falling to the cement floor. Some of the women quickly diagnosed her swoon as epilepsy, while others claimed it was the result of untreated anaemia.

  The nearest thing to a doctor among the tenants was Arman Dourian, a semi-retired dentist and the only widower in the building. This extremely courteous and conservative individual, who now lived alone with his cat, belonged to a dying breed. He normally wore a mournful face that suggested a deep, chronic pain. He couldn’t do much apart from take the woman’s pulse. His pliers, drills and blood-pressure gauge were upstairs in his apartment where he used to receive his patients two mornings a week. He could easily have pulled the old woman’s teeth but it wouldn’t have helped her regain consciousness. They carried her upstairs to her flat.

  ‘Our first casualty. Poor woman, she couldn’t even remember her daughter’s name,’ Seth’s father, Chaim announced gravely.

  ‘She isn’t dead yet,’ Anton cut in.

  ‘It’s the evil around us,’ Becky, Chaim’s wife, confirmed.

  They needn’t have worried about Angèle’s mother. She was in the competent hands of a veteran dental surgeon who was well-known for his gentle drilling, light injections, solid fillings and skills in painless extraction.

  Angèle, the only child of the family, had lost her father when she was fifteen years old. She lived with her mother and worked as an assistant accountant for a Turkish import–export company. She was one of the rare women in the building who was neither wife nor mistress. She gave the impression she had moved seamlessly from the short frocks of her childhood to the half-length navy blue and grey dresses of spinsterhood. She had spent most of her life rejecting suitors, complaining that none of them was cultured enough to become her life companion. The other tenants thought she would be an excellent match for Dr Dourian but the old dentist considered Angèle too young; and besides, he wasn’t interested in complicating his quiet existence.

  Noni, like Angèle, lived with her mother and her bachelor brother, Raffi. She was playing cards with Selma, a desolate housewife, who sated her many desires by secretly devouring Turkish delight.

  The children were jubilant, yelling, some hiding under the washbasin or behind their parents’ chairs, others in the janitor’s apartment. The janitor had left the door open so people could use the toilet.

  Half an hour later, the good news reached the basement: the dentist had saved the old woman’s life, by taking her blood pressure twice, slapping her three times and making her drink a cupful of rosewater.

  Tomas’s mother Lucie smiled, ‘I’ve always said that Dourian is an excellent dentist.’

  Becky objected, ‘Madame Lucie, the old woman wasn’t suffering from toothache.’

  ‘Toothache, passing out, what’s the difference? After all, he cured her, didn’t h
e?’

  Then realizing Tomas was nowhere to be seen, Lucie became somewhat alarmed. ‘Anton, have you seen Tomas?’ she asked her husband who was talking to Anya’s parents.

  Anya’s mother smiled. ‘He must be with Anya,’ she said.

  ‘But I don’t see them,’ Lucie replied.

  Nelli, who had an altogether different awareness of matters between boys and girls, wondered, ‘Weren’t you ever in love, Lucie, when you were young?’

  Nelli’s question outraged Lucie. She sat dazed for a moment. ‘Not at their age!’ she finally managed to reply.

  ‘Better get used to it, Lucie,’ Nelli said. Her face took on a rosy hue, despite the blue bulb hanging in the middle of the room.

  God, these Russians! Lucie thought and didn’t dare continue. She liked Anya’s mother, and they visited each other occasionally. It was strange, however, for a mother to be so blasé about such crucial matters. If she were not so embarrassed she would have gone to look for them. And she recalled, fleetingly, her second cousin, whom she had been madly in love with as a young girl.

  While the mothers were talking Tomas and Anya were having a good time in the storage section.

  ‘I love air raids,’ Tomas said.

  ‘Me too.’

  They burst out giggling.

  ‘Seth must be looking for me.’

  ‘Go then ...’ she said in an angry tone.

  He wanted to assure her that he’d much rather be with her, but the words stuck in his throat. He grabbed her hands firmly instead.

  ‘I’ve got something to tell you, Anya.’

  She looked at him. She couldn’t exactly see his flushed cheeks in the dark. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Promise you won’t tell anybody as long as you live.’

  ‘Cross my heart, I won’t tell anybody as long as I live.’ With her right hand she drew an X on her heart.

  ‘All right then,’ said Tomas, encouraged by her gesture. ‘Did you hear what happened to the taxation director’s car a few days ago?’

  ‘My parents were talking about it. They saw a picture of it in the paper.’ Then she added jokingly, ‘Zorro is everywhere, isn’t he? Like God.’

  Pride in being compared to God prompted him to add, ‘I know who that Zorro is!’

  ‘Wow!’ Too bad the dim glow of the distant blue bulb couldn’t reveal the exact expression on her pretty face. ‘Tell me, who is he?’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘I promise I won’t tell a soul as long as I live.’

  ‘All right, then ... as long as you live.’

  Tomas recalled how disappointed he had been when his father refused to tell him the true significance of aksor. It was juvenile on his part to bring up such a secretive matter, especially when he’d pledged to Speedy Hellcat, Whistling Death and Night Fighter that he would never speak of it. Hell, Death and Night would haunt him for the rest of his days. He was much worse than Judas! He had blurted it out for the sake of impressing Anya.

  She hugged him. ‘Tell me.’ She felt wetness on Tomas’s face. ‘You’re crying!’

  ‘No I’m not.’

  ‘Cross my heart, I won’t tell anyone!’ she whispered. ‘It must be you.’

  She gazed at her Zorro lovingly, noticing how handsome he was – the valiant, sculpted features of a hero, with a brow and nose descending in one line, typically Armenian – and she was sure she had never seen anything so utterly captivating before.

  ‘I know you won’t,’ Tomas said.

  They clasped each other tightly. Desire penetrated every nook and cranny of their flesh. It was the first time they had ever experienced such desire. They kissed. They touched. Though timidly, they pressed against each other. Between hesitancy and attraction, the details of the pictures that they had formulated of each other stood out more clearly: her warm body, her breasts, lustrous even in her blouse, his hard-on, their kisses ... Suddenly they heard children’s voices from the laundry room. They let go. Tomas pulled his sweater down to cover the bulge in his pants. There seemed no choice but to go back to join their parents.

  ‘There you are,’ Anya’s mother said, smiling, her fresh rosy face even rosier.

  Anya whirled around like a dervish instead of responding to her mother’s remark.

  ‘We should go up now. The danger is over,’ Tomas’s mother said.

  Tomas didn’t respond.

  Anya and Tomas’s fathers were discussing Monsieur Dimidis, the only Greek tenant in the building.

  ‘Dimidis is a danger,’ Andrea Novotni insisted.

  ‘The landlord should kick him out,’ Papa agreed.

  ‘All he needs is a good reason.’

  Dimidis was sitting on a stool against the cracked plastered wall near the washbasin, peacefully reading Apoyevmatini, the Greek daily. He was a teacher at Zapion, the Greek high school and lived beyond his means: driving a late-model Nash; his two daughters attending Notre Dame de Sion; renting an expensive yalι along the Bosporus every summer. His neighbours wondered how it was possible for the man to pay for all this on a miserable teacher’s salary: ‘For sure he didn’t make all that money teaching.’ Some people were convinced that he was spying for the Germans. He never refuted the rumours, which increased the air of mystery about him.

  Angèle was the only person in the building who believed in him. She kept assuring everybody that Spiro Dimidis was not a secret agent and that he had won the New Year’s lottery a few years back. He had kept it a secret in order to shield himself from ravenous relatives. But nobody believed her. Angèle’s interpretation was too simplistic and too boring. Spiro was a male Mata Hari, capable of putting Interpol, the FBI and MI5 to shame.

  *

  Morning was breaking against the black window blind. The janitor turned the blue bulbs off and pulled the blind up. Above, the sky shimmered a pure azure: no clouds, no planes. The tenants could see each other clearly. Some started leaving; others finished their games. The children were exhausted. Luckily it was Sunday and they didn’t have to go to school. The night that had begun so fiercely had finished with no casualties. A silvery blue light slipped through the laundry window. The cigarette smoke had piled halfway up to the ceiling. No guns were firing, not even in the distance. If they ever had another air raid, no one would bother to run to the neighbourhood bunker. They were better served in their own building where they didn’t need to get dressed to go down to the basement.

  Arto and Elmonik were enchanted. They had made enough money to buy a little toaster. It was true that war could make some people rich – with a few more air raids they might even make enough money to buy a new stove! They walked peacefully to the ground floor and began mopping the lobby.

  *

  The following day people learned that a stray German fighter plane had been responsible for the panic. The pilot had lost his bearings and flown over the wrong city. For days, though, it was front-page news. Fanciful stories ensued, romanticizing the pilot and turning him into a German spy involved in salacious scandals.

  13

  The gang of four still felt like fugitives hiding from the police. There had been a few arrests in connection with Vehbi Bey’s vandalized car. The suspects, however, were released within twenty-four hours. As the days passed, the arrests stopped and the incident was classified as unsolved and became part of the sketchy archives of the city’s security bureau. The boys’ fear gradually dissipated, and one fine February afternoon they decided to celebrate their remarkable counterattack.

  The schoolyard was swarming with boys. It was the last break of the day.

  ‘Let’s go to the movies,’ Bebo suggested.

  ‘Bah! Let’s do something different,’ Haig said.

  ‘Like what?’ Bebo asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Haig replied.

  ‘How about going to a football game?’ Bebo asked.

  ‘Forget it, Bebo!’ Tomas was frustrated.

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Shut up until you come up with something different
,’ Aram hollered.

  ‘I’ve got it!’ Tomas sounded all excited.

  The three of them waited for Tomas to spit it out.

  ‘How about going to a brothel?’

  Incredulous stares. Vertiginous spells. Tingling erections.

  Aram bawled, ‘How about that!’

  ‘Tomas, you are a tiger.’ Haig sounded delirious.

  Bebo remained quiet.

  ‘How about you, Bebo?’ Tomas asked.

  ‘I’ve never been to a brothel.’

  ‘I haven’t either,’ Tomas confessed.

  Haig and Aram’s silence confirmed that neither had they.

  It was agreed: they would collectively lose their virginity in one of the brothels in the Abanoz quarter of Istanbul.

  There were three major obstacles, though. The first was financial. The second was emotional. And the third was practical: how to persuade the madam to let them in!

  *

  Tomas ran home. He climbed the steps two by two, put the key in the brass lock and opened the apartment door. Nobody was home. He thought of calling Anya but remembering their plan he felt a sudden remorse. He was going to a brothel – not for a cordial visit, not to eat bananas with the women, or to sip tea, but to cheat on Anya! He thought of the excitement he had felt as he ran home, planning to count his savings. In the stillness of the apartment he plunged into sombre thought. He heard classical music from the second floor. It was coming from Anya’s apartment. The music suited his jumbled mood. He sat on the bed and inspected the bedroom: a desk, a bed, a chest of drawers, an oval mirror, two armchairs, whitewashed walls ... As his eyes roved continuously around the room he suddenly thought of a brilliant excuse: he loved Anya, and yet he continued to jerk off virtually every night. Was going to the brothel not just another kind of masturbating? But with the assistance of a pro, a woman he didn’t even know. A woman he didn’t love. It was like going to the doctor or the dentist to quell pain. Besides, it would prevent him from acting like a novice when it was time to do it with Anya. He wasn’t convinced. He recalled their kissing in the park while the afternoon tumbled into twilight. And then their embracing down in the shelter. He was still perturbed. The music stopped. Anya must be home, he said to himself. He lay on the bed with his coat on, lost in a daydream.