The Star of Istanbul

by Robert Olen Butler

  She went out the main doors and spoke to one of the brass-buttoned, pigeon-plumed boys, who led her to a taxi at the hotel’s stand. I slipped past her as she was getting in and I got into the next taxi. I unsuccessfully rushed through English and German with the driver and found a mutual French just in time to have him follow.

  We briefly descended the hill toward the Bosporus and then turned into the street the locals called İstiklal Caddesi—Independence Avenue—but which was known within Pera itself as the Grand Rue de Péra.

  The taxis rushed way too fast for all the people and horses and carts and we slowed only for an electric tram. This was a car on the same line that this morning had been carrying the Turkish wounded to the German hospital in Pera, at one end crowded with Turkish men in suits and fezes and at the other with men in suits and Alpines—no doubt Germans—whose company included Western women dolled up and showing their faces and arms. How breathless with desire were those Turks on the tram, I wondered, at the public sight of these usually hidden female parts. And my driver drove more with his horn than his brake or his gearshift and I supposed Selene’s taxi ahead was doing likewise.

  We soon arrived near a brightly lit café and a darkened Bon Marché. I paid and delayed in my taxi and watched through the front window as Selene emerged.

  I opened my taxi door and stepped out as she hurried directly across the sidewalk and disappeared beneath the arch of a marble building-front. I followed.

  The Turks among the crowd of Western swells bumped past me in my crossing. The fezes never seemed to stop their forward hurtle in a crowded Istanbul street. A dance band was playing somewhere along the way. I passed through the arch, with two towering concrete Nubian maidens in diaphanous gowns posed at each side of the pier. A corridor led deep inside, bright with electric lights and lined with poster portraits of Chaplin and Fairbanks and Pickford and Gish.

  I stopped beside the portrait of Bourgani, as Bourgani herself stopped a dozen yards ahead to buy a ticket from the cashier in a marble kiosk. She was in profile to me, though she had not lifted her veil. Beyond her were heavy swinging glass doors and above them, in thick, loopy, all-capitaled Art Nouveau style, looking like a stop on the Paris Metro, was the name of this place: cinéma de pera.

  I was reconciled to her seeing me, but she did not look in my direction. She turned from the kiosk and moved toward the doors and I stepped forward and quickly bought a ticket.

  Through those doors, the space opened up widely to the left and right, shaping an outer lobby. Along it were four archways opening to the auditorium’s aisles: two at the far sides and two defining a large center section and two smaller side sections. I did not see Selene. I chose the left-center arch and stepped in and pulled up instantly. She was standing just a couple of paces before me, in the middle of the aisle, absolutely still.

  The place was dim but I could clearly see its froufrou, its gilded cherubs and its rolling terra-cotta flowering vines and its theatrical masks as gaudy as any Belasco house on Broadway. The forward rows were mostly full; the high screen before us was not yet lit. From somewhere in the middle of the auditorium men’s voices surged—in German—and broke into laughter. Perhaps they were some of the boys from the Pera Palace.

  I took all this in but I kept Selene in the edge of my sight, and now I looked at her again. The back few rows were less populated, and just before her, the aisle seat in the left-hand section was empty. She took a step forward and sat in it. I sat on the aisle in the center section, one row behind her.

  The house lights dimmed further and went out.

  I realized I had not looked at the final poster, which announced tonight’s film. Perhaps Selene hadn’t either. I had a feeling she was here no matter what was playing. This was her house.

  The screen lit up white and the clatter of the film projector began from above and behind us, and that soon faded with the sound of an accompanying piano—a strong, well-tuned piano—a grand, up front in the shadows beneath the screen.

  The short subjects had already been played. The feature began and the first title card came up:

  Max Reinhardt Präsentiert

  DER LILIM

  Selene’s German movie.

  And the next title:

  Regie

  Kurt Fehrenbach

  I looked in her direction.

  She was lifting her veil.

  The light from the screen fell softly upon her face. I was a little behind her, but to see the screen she was looking across the center section of seats. She was almost in profile to me. She could see nothing of me—her angle put me just behind her periphery—but I had enough of her face in this darkened space for it to prickle my skin.

  I looked back to the screen, even as the cinematographer credit—Photographie—faded away and the cast list came up, character and actor. Personen. And the star of this movie was at the top of the list, her name writ large:

  Lilith Weiss . . . . . SELENE BOURGANI.

  The second lead was somewhat smaller, Martin Beckenbach played by Emil Jannings. I did not read the list further. I looked again at Selene.

  Her face was lifted slightly. The light flickered there but her face did not change for a long few moments, and then it did. Her eyes closed and I looked and she was there before us both, Selene Bourgani the film actress.

  She was leaning against a bar in a nightclub and she was lit bright in the middle of dim bodies drinking and dancing and embracing all around her and the shadows were dark and sharp-edged and her splay of hair was a wild dark shadow of its own. We saw her face in close-up and her dark eyes were enormous—Selene’s eyes seemed always to be the blackest thing on the screen—and she was burning. And we saw the object of her fire: a young man dancing with a woman across the room. But not dancing with the crazed self-absorption of all the other dancers. This couple was dancing with their eyes fixed on each other. This was a couple in love.

  And the movie went on. She was good. Her performance seemed far more real to me, in that enormous image at the front of the auditorium, than I’d remembered from my previous encounters with her films. But from what I knew of her, what I knew of her body, what our two bodies knew of each other, perhaps from the fact that I had lately been the object of her fire, I could only see this woman on the screen as Selene.

  In the next scene it was clear that this Lilith Weiss had come to possess the young man she’d desired in the nightclub. But she cast him off in the morning and ruined him with the woman he’d loved. And the movie went on, and she carried on in this same way. Selene played the modern succubus, seeking out men in the night and seducing them and then abandoning them and destroying them by exposing their deeds to their wives and to the world.

  She had a long and sometimes delicate, sometimes horrific solitary scene in her own small room where she remembered her father and how he went out and destroyed women in just such a way and how he always came back home and beat her mother. And Selene rose after these memories and opened a drawer in her commode and took out a photograph of her mother and she looked at it and wept.

  All of this was filmed in a severely stylized urban landscape, where nothing stood straight, where everything leaned and tilted as if to fall; where everything was stalked by or shrouded in shadow; where black and white abutted along razor-cut borders; where people appeared and vanished before your eyes.

  And at last she saw a man in a park berating his wife and then slapping her across the cheek. And Selene—this Lilith—stalked this man, and she began the process of seduction, as she did the others, and she brought him back to her room. But this man she did not expose; this man she did not abandon. As he was eagerly stripping down to his union suit, she moved to her commode and opened the drawer, and for the first time we could see inside. There was her mother’s picture. And there was a pistol. She took out the pistol. And she shot the man to death.
/>
  Several times I looked at Selene as she watched herself from an aisle seat of the Cinéma De Pera. Each time it had been the same: her face was lifted slightly, in precisely the same angle; her face flickered softly from the light of the screen; she showed no emotion whatsoever. And I looked a last time when the man she’d shot on screen doubled over and sank to his knees.

  This time she closed her eyes, not to avoid seeing this act but softly, as if to meditate. And then she lowered her face and she opened her eyes. She turned her face directly to me. As if she’d known I was there all along.

  I nodded to her.

  She did not nod in return. But neither did she take her face from mine.

  I raised my hands before me and I gave her a slow-motion, soundless round of applause. When I finished, she turned her face away again. She lowered her veil and then she sat waiting, as did I, until the screen flickered dark, the piano fell silent, the house lights went up full, and the audience filed past us.

  When the ushers rushed by, toward the front to prepare the theater for the next showing, Selene and I rose. I stepped into the aisle first and waited for her. She turned to me. She stopped. She even lifted her veil.

  The face she presented felt recently familiar. It had a sense of an extinguished light, of a mind emptied of memory but full of its sad effects. It was the face of the solitary Lilith Weiss as she looked up from the picture of her mother in her hand.

  “We have to talk now,” I said.

  And she said, “Not till we are sitting at your table in the hotel salon.”

  48

  Selene Bourgani and I arrived at the corner table where I’d spent the afternoon. After four reels’ worth of piano music at the cinema tonight, another piano was playing at the far end of the salon. We settled into our chairs and Selene lifted her veil, but the piano’s slow, sad little waltz turned both our faces toward it.

  Then she looked at me.

  She shivered. Very faintly, but I saw it and I knew what it was about. I sensed it more than saw it, really. And I knew what it was because I felt a small, similar tremor myself.

  “We both heard that,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  On the Lusitania the night we met. “Songe d’Automne.”

  I laid my forearm on the tabletop, stretching halfway toward her, and she looked at it.

  She slowly removed her black gloves, watching the process closely as she did so.

  She sensed the incipient lift of my arm from the table, more intention than action.

  “Wait,” she said softly.

  I stopped.

  She put her bare right hand on top of mine for a moment. She squeezed. She withdrew.

  “I haven’t forgotten what you did,” she said.

  I wished I could omit the talk for this evening, could just drink with her and take her to her room and hope for gentle please on this night, as uncharacteristic as I’d always thought that was for me with a woman.

  But it was I who had to get rough now, in another way.

  I think she knew it.

  She was reading my face. “Let’s order some wine before we speak,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Something French,” she said.

  And so we decided upon a white, a chilled bottle of an oakey Pouilly-Fuissé.

  We took our first sips without touching glasses. We weren’t superstitious types. We both knew we had business to do.

  “When did you see me tonight?” I asked.

  “Before I stepped into the salon,” she said.

  “I’m glad you’re taking precautions,” I said. “Things will get difficult now.”

  She laughed softly. “As if they haven’t already?”

  “I prefer surprises to unknowns.”

  She nodded.

  I said, “And there are too many unknowns ahead of us as it is. We can’t have any between us now.”

  She looked at me. “I thought we had an agreement.”

  “That lapsed,” I said.

  She waited.

  I had to play my possibilities as certainties.

  “Why would an Armenian go to bed with a Turk?” I said. And even as her eyes flickered, telling me I was right, I added, “Especially a Turk with the blood of your people on his hands.”

  She made her eyes go dead and she took a sip of her wine.

  “I told you I’m only doing this for myself,” she said, though her voice was too soft, too much on the verge of a tremor.

  “You need to hope the movies never start to talk,” I said.

  She knew what I meant.

  “I’m not acting,” she said.

  “That’s why I can tell you’re lying,” I said.

  “Don’t you think my people want to know his plans?”

  That thought had continued to kick around in me and I figured it would stop kicking once she confessed it. It didn’t.

  “What’s your name?” I said, moving away to the unexpected question for now, the easier question to answer. I would play this in that other persona, a role I found myself missing: Christopher Cobb, reporter. I missed simply getting a fragment of a fact here, another there, and then wedding them in my Corona, putting it on the street and moving on.

  But my life was on the line. Hers too. I could do this like a reporter only if it worked.

  “Selene Bourgani,” she said, but she played the lie now. Her voice said to me: Guess.

  Selene was the Greek goddess of the moon. “What’s the Armenian word for the moon?” I asked.

  She smiled. “My name,” she said.

  I waited.

  She leaned to me across the table. Her voice went very soft. She said, “Can’t we just go upstairs now and fuck?”

  I am a man of words. Words and theatrics. King James for words. Shakespeare for theatrics. For both, actually. I love that forbidden word, to be honest. The possibility of that word. And at this moment her using that word felt as if she had just put her hands together at the center of her chest in this public place and ripped open her black bodice and exposed her naked breasts.

  But I said, “No. We can’t.”

  She didn’t speak. She looked at me and I looked at her. Then she said, “Lucine.”

  I did not speak.

  And she said, “My name is Lucine Bedrosian.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  She did not speak.

  “It’s a beautiful name,” I said.

  Her eyes filled with tears. These were not sentimental tears. Her face had tightened; her jaw had clenched. I thought for a moment she was angry at me for forcing her to say her name.

  But she said, “If we are ever alone again . . .” And she stopped. She worked to control her voice. “In the way that we have been alone.” She was in control now. “I would like you to say that name.”

  “I will,” I said.

  “But never anywhere else,” she said.

  I nodded. I lifted my glass and held it between us. She lifted hers and she touched mine and we drank. And I wanted the curtain to come down on that. The chapter to end. But it couldn’t.

  Her glass was empty. I poured in three fingers. I did the same in mine.

  I said this as gently as I could. “Did your father try to talk you out of coming here?”

  There was a stopping in her.

  I didn’t mean to play upon her so ruthlessly. She had no idea I’d been there.

  “Briefly,” she said.

  “I was at the pub on the docks in London.”

  This was a moment like the moment that eventually arrived in the sex between us. After she’d held her own, after she’d worked back at me, at some moment she would let go, she would let me carry us forward.

&nbs
p; “You were there?”

  “Yes.”

  She shook her head no, not to doubt what I said but to wonder at how she’d missed this.

  “I was standing at the bar,” I said.

  “You followed me.”

  “Yes. Brauer did too. He was outside, waiting. I followed both of you.”

  She’d been sitting in the way women sit, dining or drinking in public: upright, nearly at the edge of the chair. But at this, her head and her shoulders did a slow slump, stopped by her elbows landing on the arms of the chair, and she turned her face away, looking off vaguely toward the far end of the salon, where the piano was playing a Chopin nocturne.

  “That’s why he came to me on the North Sea,” she said.

  Mostly to herself, explaining what she never quite understood.

  When she let a few moments go by without speaking, I said, “And why you shot him.”

  She straightened a bit; she looked at me. “Yes,” she said. “He didn’t figure it out as completely as you did, and I guess that night at the bar he convinced himself this man was just some aging money bag who’d been keeping me. But some of the details kept working at him. And he finally came to my cabin and confronted me. He wasn’t cut out for this work. He hadn’t said anything to anyone else about his suspicions and he was stupid enough to tell me so. And he was starting to talk crazy. He was threatening to make trouble in Istanbul. What I did, it felt like self-defense. And he was going to hurt a lot more people than me.”

  This all came out in a quiet rush.

  Then it stopped, and she took a slug of wine like it was whiskey. When her glass was down, she looked me hard in the eyes. “You would’ve done the same,” she said.

  And things began to fit together. The Armenians seemed to be, from all accounts, particularly inept at organizing and defending themselves. What good would a little bed talk from Enver Pasha do them? She wasn’t giving herself to him for that. And then there was her question on the first night she and I made love. Have you ever killed a man?

  And then tonight. As if I were picking a lock, the final tumbler lifted: she’d needed to see her German movie. The climactic scene. She’d played this role once before.