Once, when my aunt fell ill, my father sent a doctor to her villa, paying for the visit out of his pocket. No one there could ever forget how she screamed at my father as she drove him and the doctor away: “Why the rush? Sooner or later it’ll all be yours!” I won’t deny the fact that as my father’s financial situation worsened he came to see my aunt’s estate as his only hope for salvation. Moreover, my aunt’s health had sharply declined—a result of her peculiarly sparse diet, her ceaseless agitation, and her paranoia about her wealth. Her spirits were at an all-time low. She refused to leave my father alone, demanding unimaginable sacrifices in return for the inheritance he was soon to receive and taking every opportunity to shame and abuse him. Gradually my aunt ceased to be my father’s sister: she became his burden.
Toward the end my aunt lost control of half her body. My father just could not understand how she could carry on living semiparalyzed, especially since she continued to harangue him as vigorously as ever, and he put it down to rancorous sentiments she must have harbored for him since childhood. According to my father, she continued living only to spite him. After suffering a day of malicious torment at the invalid’s bedside, he would return from the villa in Etyemez and whimper: “Is it really possible? Who would continue to live like that? The miserable creature is tormenting me, just out of spite. But God is great . . .”
All this goes to show that my father saw himself as the oppressed party.
But at last the fateful day arrived. With tears pouring from her eyes, the half-crazed chambermaid came to inform us that my aunt had passed away. My father rushed off to her villa to take the required preliminary measures. Funeral prayers were performed in Lâleli. My father delegated the burial to our neighbor Ibrahim Bey, so he could return directly to the villa in Etyemez after prayers, to watch over its contents so that nothing might go missing. To my mind, this was his gravest mistake in the whole affair. For if he hadn’t been swept away by the fear of losing her estate and its property, my aunt would have been buried in a timely fashion, thereby reducing the likeliness of her resurrection. And—even if she had been destined to rise again from the dead—my father would have been standing at the head of her grave, desperate and aggrieved, beating his head with his hands and tearing at his clothes, with tears flowing from his eyes—all of which would have ensured a happy outcome. Instead we were met with a very unhappy outcome indeed. Ibrahim Bey had arranged a pauper’s funeral, entirely unbefitting the bride of the warden of the street sweeper’s trade guild, just so he could skim from the money my father had given him for the burial proceedings. And because it proved difficult to locate her late husband’s tomb—not a soul from the family was there to watch her burial beside it—the grave diggers began late: from start to finish, the entire operation was marred by infelicitous delays. When at last the coffin lid was cut open to tip the corpse into the freshly dug grave, my aunt awoke from a deep coma, and because she was the type of creature who was never caught unawares, even in the most extraordinary of circumstances, she heaved the coffin lid aside and assessed the scene, and with what she later viewed as her eternal powers of perspicacity, she grasped the situation immediately, shouting out to the only person she recognized there, the imam from Etyemez: “Quick, hurry up and take me home!”
As Ibrahim Bey told me later, most of the mourners were terrified, and at once took to their heels, thus making the task of returning the casket from the cemetery in Merkezefendi to my aunt’s villa all the more difficult. Had she not given a ferocious scolding to those who had not been so quick off the mark, it’s unlikely she would have made it home at all.
First she ordered the imam to give her a coatlike cape that had been abandoned by one of the diggers at the graveside, and after wrapping it tightly around her, she proceeded to direct the procession from the stretcher that held the coffin. With half her body jutting out of the casket, and shouting out instructions to the luckless souls charged with carrying her back to her villa in Etyemez (she had the gall to order them to take her all the way back home in the very manner they had brought her to the graveyard—no less would have been expected of her), she even managed to stop off at the first pastry shop they came across after entering the city, purchasing a savory bun to relieve her hunger.
This bizarre return from the world beyond, and the fantastical death of my aunt, now alive in her coffin and nibbling on her savory bun, attracted much attention in the backstreets of various neighborhoods as they lumbered along, so that by the time they reached the home my aunt had once entered as a bride, they had almost half the population of the district behind them; the procession had taken on the aura of a victory march.
Meanwhile my father, knowing nothing of the resurrection, was still at the villa. He had seized the premises and terrorized its servants before extracting everything that seemed of any value, including items buried in the coal cellar, light in weight but heavy in worth, and he had strewn it all in the middle of the floor; his pockets were stuffed with jewels, bonds, and gold that he had rustled out from the drawers of my aunt’s bedside table, and his eyes were still searching as if to say, “Where’s the rest?” In the meantime I had dismantled the dining room clock, which had captured my imagination as a child—and always been kept well out of my reach—and was busy fiddling with its pieces in a vain and furious attempt to repair it.
I was the one who opened the door. My aunt brusquely ordered her removal from the casket they had by then lowered. There cannot have been a commander in recorded history who, after seizing victory in the battlefield, showed as much composure as my aunt when her coffin was lowered to the ground. She was in complete command, calling to mind the pictures of Caesar I’d seen in history books. Sadly, she didn’t afford me the chance to express my admiration. In fact she hardly even gave me the chance to applaud. Thrusting me aside, she stepped into the foyer, whereupon, without even looking me in the face, she cried:
“Where is that brute of a man, your father?”
Awestruck, I could only indicate with a trembling nod that he was upstairs.
“Well then take me upstairs. At once!” she cried.
But without waiting a moment for assistance, she flew up the stairs. The crowd stood stunned. My crippled aunt, who had been at death’s door, who had in fact just returned from the dead, was now walking unassisted—indeed she was bounding up the stairs!
I had never loved my father in the same way after his second marriage. Unable to distinguish the genuine man among his many masks, I was rarely convinced by his shows of suffering. But I shall never forget his face that day. The moment he saw his sister in her funeral shroud—his stingy and cantankerous sister, whom he thought he had sent off to heaven just a few hours ago—the poor man was rendered speechless by shock, or rather fear. His face trembled, white as waxed cloth, and his whole body shook. Not a word passed between them until my aunt calmly intoned: “Put everything down.”
Trying his very best to mumble something along the lines of “Welcome home, sister,” my father pulled out the various items he had stuffed into his pockets and down his shirt, his hands still trembling with fear. Five minutes later he resembled a leech dipped in ash. He had given back all he had taken, in fact even more. He’d given back more because he had, at just that precise moment, given up all hope for the future. My aunt waited patiently, clocking my father’s every movement until she was sure there was nothing left on his person save his soul, and then said:
“Now leave. And take all these people and that dimwit son of yours too. But at the very least you can make my bed before you go, and brew me some linden tea. Hurry up now, I seem to have caught a chill. It is rather cold outside.”
Father and son, we stumbled out of the house in a daze.
Now, I must confess that this ghastly business did not have the same effect on me as it had on my father. Undoubtedly my aunt was being entirely unfair with us. But I had never believed I had any right to her fortune in th
e first place. Like so many others born aggrieved, I tended to weigh any misfortune that befell me against those tragedies I had been able to avoid. It was never a matter of right or wrong. It was more complicated than that. Looking back on my life—and I am of course of an age to be doing such a thing—I see I have always had a spectator’s frame of mind. My concern with the welfare and demeanor of others has always distracted me from my own woes.
This was certainly the case that day. For despite all we lost on the day my aunt came back to life, I still found enchantment in the miracle that had unfolded before my eyes.
But there was more. Even if my father had not been so devastated as to hire a car to take us home, I would still have found delight in witnessing an event never before seen or heard in the history of our family.
There was nothing comical about my aunt’s imperial posturing, or my father’s frozen shock, or Ibrahim Bey’s dramatic retelling of the affair—even when he pounded his fists against his chest to illustrate the losses suffered. In the end what mattered most was not the great fortune, even though it had been my family’s last hope, nor was it the announcement of my aunt’s death in the papers, conveyed in the biggest and most brightly lit letters the world has ever seen; it was the one thing passed on to us from the fortune of the warden of the street sweeper’s trade guild: the enormous pendulum of the villa’s clock, which was buried deep in one of my pockets, taken from the villa that we, as father and son, had conquered, if only for a fleeting spell.
Let my father say whatever he may, but I for one got my share of the inheritance. At one point Ibrahim flashed my father a fearful look and wailed, “It’s all my fault. I could have finished the job sooner.”
My father lifted his head and mumbled, “There’s no need for you to worry, Ibrahim Bey. It was the will of God.” And after a moment’s pause he added: “Then things would have been far worse. God willing, this will be a lesson to her that will encourage her to fulfill her grandfather’s will. If only he were still alive . . .”
My father never recovered from this affair, one that few in this world ever suffer through. He was never able to shake off the tremor it gave to his hands or the heaviness that remained in his tongue.
There comes a point in any man’s life when he becomes conscious of his destiny. My father discovered his in the cruelest way imaginable. Once aware of his fate, he saw no point in curbing his carelessness or impatience, though it had been these very shortcomings that had led to our ruination. He sank into a strange silence. He became a quiet and gentle man who kept to his own corner. Yet occasionally he would glance at the pendulum (which for whatever reason he had hung on the entrance wall, never to be removed), and as he jumped to his feet, a strange and tortured smile would flash across his face.
I still marvel at how this tempestuous and eternally dissatisfied man could sink so abruptly into silent defiance.
All of us—even those not endowed with a hopeful disposition—have thought, even dreamed, of life after death. It is the reward we project onto the unknown and distant future, promising consolation for this string of catastrophes we know as life. It is a game of cards played with the very best hand, one we’re always destined to win, a wild desire that no man is ready to relinquish: the dream of living another life, provided of course there remains a narrow recollection of the past to make him conscious of the change and pleased to have left the other world behind. My aunt was the one person out of a million to taste such happiness. Sadly, her life after death—her resurrection—proved not to be the hoped-for empyrean.
Despite the unexpected manner of her return from the cliffs of eternity, on the surface she was still the same old aunt we had always known. But deep down she had undergone a profound change. This might be better understood as a revolution, seeing as my aunt’s return from the grave overturned what we, along with all her acquaintances, saw as the regulated order of her life—and in my view it rests on the following three fundamental points:
First, my aunt no longer despised the body that had carried her back in such a miserable state from the world beyond, following a death that had proved temporary. Confronted by the faults she was incapable of changing—her age, her malformations, her overall unseemliness—she no longer condemned herself. Having accepted her body as her sole source of support in this game of blindman’s bluff that we call life, she came to appreciate its value.
The second change could be seen in her regard for her wealth. Her fortune (to which formerly she had been so attached, thinking herself its sole custodian) had, if only for a few hours, found its way into her brother’s hands and pockets, and although her brother was in some way dear to her, he was still another human being; having seen how easily a fortune could change hands, she set about changing her relationship to it. Until then my aunt would have said, “I’ll hide it whatever the cost—it can only increase in value.” She had transformed her coal cellar into a kind of bank vault. But that day it was as if suddenly she had decided, “No, I shan’t keep a penny of it, and I shall no longer worry about the return. I shall sit right here and eat my way through it!”
Having turned against all those she assumed had their sights set on her money, my aunt now turned against her own fortune.
But whatever the peacemakers among us might have insisted, this did not lead to a dramatic change in the way she treated it. My aunt and her fortune had long lived in opposition to one another, like two radically different spheres, coexisting as polar opposites, and it was the conflict itself that brought about a certain equilibrium. At the time of her provisional death, my aunt had relinquished everything, but following her miraculous resurrection she took possession of her fortune most forcefully.
In making that outlandish journey from the graveyard back to her home, in drawing upon the strength of her will to subdue all those around her—for the crowd surely would have preferred the serenity of a burial to the fated resurrection—in embarking on this adventure, my aunt had at last discovered this thing called life. Swayed by a soft March sun shimmering behind a thin curtain of gently falling snow, and by the biting wind blowing over the old city walls, not to mention the ever-multiplying, weeping crowds and the faces looming over her, she was beset by emotions that until then had lain dormant. Life did exist after all! Both the rich and the poor were alive. They laughed, shouted, cried, worried, loved, and grieved, but above all they lived. Why would she not do the same? Especially now, when she had so much of what these people most desired. She had discovered life on her journey home; crossing over her hearth to watch my father remove precious stones from under his shirt and out of his pockets, she discovered the true value of her fortune.
The third and final change was physical. The fearful joy she’d felt at eluding death and the surge of panic she’d endured while recapturing her fortune combined to jolt my aunt out of illness and paralysis.
The result, you might well ask? It was this: my aunt, who was taken home in a victory chariot like Caesar, accompanied perhaps by a third of the city, woke up the next day from a long and peaceful sleep in perfect condition, and she bounded right out of bed.
The first thing she did was send for the imam, to whom she gave her late husband’s entire wardrobe, along with personal effects she had kept as memento mori. Then she hopped in a carriage and set off to visit a financier who took her to the finest seamstresses in all of Beyoglu. For days, she busied herself with the latest fashions. Meanwhile she had the villa of the warden of the street sweeper’s trade guild cleaned, restored, whitewashed, and renovated. And she even bought herself a small carriage with black rubber wheels.
The day the new carriage arrived, a butler, a male cook, and a new team of chambermaids began working at the villa. Once this team was in place, my aunt relieved her ward, Safinaz Hanım, of the title ahretlik, thus emancipating her from indentured service. In severing this immortal bond, she relinquished all concern with the world to come. The poor woman left the ho
use in a hired carriage with two trunks and a few pennies in her pocket. In the space of a week (seeing as human beings always need companionship), Nasit Bey had taken her place, moving into the villa with his son and daughter to become my aunt’s second husband and our new relative. Six months later they went together to Vienna to take the cure, and not long after their return, Nasit Bey became a deputy member of the Committee for Union and Progress. Thereafter he embarked on a significant business venture, availing himself of my aunt’s fortune.
In all this our only acquisition, apart from the pendulum, was Safinaz Hanım. After living for a short while with a relative in Besiktas, she ran out of money, only to remember that her former guardian had a brother who lived in a small, comfortable, modest, and cozy little four-roomed home in Edirnekapı, and with the last penny in her pocket she hired a carriage and directed it to take her and her empty trunk to our home.
XII
Aristidi Efendi’s death brought an end to our quest for gold. And my aunt’s rebirth wiped out all hope of an inheritance. All we had left was Seyit Lutfullah and the treasure he was still so passionately seeking. Needless to say, another ill-fated and untimely event ruined this, our last, chance.
Seyit Lutfullah had begun delivering sermons on certain days at a small mosque somewhere near the Yemis Pier. During one of these sermons, the poor soul suddenly felt called upon to reveal a startling truth that he had kept secret from everyone until that moment.
After enumerating various material and spiritual threats to the Islamic world and bemoaning the mounting chaos around us, he told the faithful gathered before him that things simply could not carry on as they were and that the time was ripe for a new mehdi, a messiah who was soon to arrive to put an end to the confusion; and at the end of his speech, he trumpeted the good tidings at the top of his lungs: “Lo, I am that new messiah! I have only to make myself known. But I will do so soon enough . . . and then you shall all flock to my side.”