“The voice was quite muffled. It sounded as if it was coming from far away, through miles of dense fog, but I could still just make out the words, or rather they were inside me. It was a very sad voice. No one in the land of the living could sound so belligerent and aggrieved.”
So said a young poet held in high regard by our coffeehouse coterie.
“As I listened to that voice, my thoughts gained the clarity of crystal,” he recalled. “When I asked if Nevzat Hanım was at home, he said, ‘Yes, but it would be best for you to stay away, as she’s not feeling at all well.’”
A rich merchant named Suayp Bey gave an altogether different account:
“Once the line went through, I heard for the very first time in my life what you might call pure silence. This wasn’t silence as you or I have come to know it; it was something else. Then someone intoned: ‘Who’s there?’ I gave my name and said, ‘I was wondering if I might ask you about a book Nevzat Hanım was going to give me . . . ?’ Until he cried, ‘Forget about the book. Go home at once. Your wife’s had an accident. Run! And don’t stop!’ I asked him who he was and he said, ‘I am Murat,’ before hanging up on me. It was as if the voice was chastising me.”
Suayp Bey then told us that when he returned home he found his wife crumpled in a heap at the bottom of the stairs.
Three weeks later the lawyer Nail Bey gave us yet another glimpse of this Murat who involved himself so intimately in our worldly affairs, who returned from the world beyond to issue reprimands and warnings and wise counsel:
“It was truly bizarre. First I heard this unholy din; there were whistles and bells—you might have thought the world was coming to an end. Then I heard a voice: ‘Wrong number!’ So I hung up and dialed again. But the same thing happened again. On my third try, the same voice said, ‘I don’t think you understand, the hanımefendi cannot come to the phone right now. She’s busy.’ I interjected, ‘Fine, but I need to speak to her about the apartment. It’s an extremely important matter,’ only to have him reproach me: ‘Have you no understanding of her character whatsoever? She cannot come to the phone now; she’s working, consulting with the spirits. Please do not insist!’ Then I asked, ‘Who is this?’ And he answered, ‘You still don’t know who I am? I am Murat!’ In the background I could still hear cymbals and bells and foghorns. But the oddest thing was the wooden mockery in his voice.”
Cemal Bey and I were the only ones who had never spoken to Murat on the telephone, and neither had we met him at the apartment in Sisli. But to tell you the truth, this didn’t put me out in the least.
Had I never met Cemal Bey, my time at the Spiritualist Society would have been a pure delight; nothing in this world could have taken me away from it. Who doesn’t relish that sweet shiver running down the spine when communing with the world beyond?
But, sadly, I did meet Cemal Bey, and, sadly, I was putty in his hands. In any event, I was in no position to pass up the chance to make a little extra money, even if it was only now and then. One day Cemal Bey cornered me. I should say that he was initially taken aback by my attire, and that he found my personality preposterous. He made no attempt to hide his surprise: “So, such people do actually exist!” he declared, before sending me off on a personal errand. It went on like this until the very end. No sooner had he seen me at the association than he sent me off on some urgent errand. He would begin, “Hayri, my dear lamb, could you possibly . . . ?” But the honey in his voice would never last long. I rarely saw him speak to me without his feet pointing disrespectfully at my nose. And the words themselves were pure horror. What might have been a mere repetition turned quickly into an insult:
“Tomorrow, at eleven o’clock . . . You won’t forget, now? Yes, at eleven o’clock, at precisely eleven, you understand?”
He would say all this in a voice so sharp and strident that it made me lightheaded and nauseous; it was as if he took a pocketknife and carved every word into my brain. Then, without warning, a dark curtain would drop over my eyes and I’d be clenching my fists. In moments such as those I would have happily given away half my life for the chance to bash in his chin and rearrange his face—knocking his fat, oily jowls right up into his finely plucked eyebrows, smashing him to bits like a broken old record. But this storm would be short-lived, for now Selma Hanım came to life in my mind, her voluptuous body overflowing like the tide, her fine, supple curves swelling as if her corset had just been loosened, with the modesty of her measured gaze tempered by the sweet tickle of her laugh; until I could think only of the prize I’d be granted for my patience:
“Yes, sir.”
Sometimes he’d rattle off the name of a tailor, cobbler, or department store or give me the name and address of a wealthy Jewish merchant I was to meet on the dock before helping him carry his luggage to his car—or rather I’d carry all his luggage myself: he made sure I had all the details of the assigned task. As the strain of work mounted, I’d nearly choke on the rage and disgust I felt for the man. It wasn’t enough for him write the names and addresses and the task to be done on a simple piece of paper. He would have me read his lists back to him, as many as ten times over—this to convince himself that I’d memorized not just the errands but the order in which I was to carry them out.
I tolerated all this in the hope of catching a glimpse of Selma Hanım, if not sooner then later. Sometimes, in a last attempt at self-defense, my lips would twist into a smile that was, I hoped, a subtle blend of pride and mockery, as with my eyes I made as if to say, “Can’t you see how I’m suffering for this fool? But I’m just having him on—don’t get the wrong idea. I’m just enjoying this while it lasts as . . .” It was, I hoped, a glare that drew my cohorts at the coffeehouse into my game, making them my playmates and partners in crime.
But whoever even noticed my furtive glances or pathetic smiles? Cemal Bey was possessed of an autocrat’s diminishing gaze: he might have been viewing us from his own personal fire tower; and so blinding was the force of his personality that no one could have seen those changes in my expression, even if I’d held a lantern to my face.
So, no, charm was not Cemal’s strong point; the only thing (remotely) bearable about the man was the warmth of his greeting. But his friendly overtures were more difficult to bear than his indifference. Should this man link his arm in mine, to whisper words meant for my ears only, I would shiver so violently one might have thought I’d succumbed to a ferocious stroke. Others suffered similarly. If Cemal happened to sit down next to him on the sofa, Suayp Bey would withdraw his hands ever so slowly and return them to his lap, and the lawyer Nail Bey seemed to freeze altogether. Yet everyone remained solicitous, respectful, fearful, and anxious to get along. He was the dangerous reptile, and we were his paralyzed prey. With such powers, he could have achieved great things in the underworld. But (as we shall see in due course) he too had come into this world with a certain weakness. It was as if fortune and chance had stripped his will of a clear purpose so as to shield themselves from its full power.
The deeper my own involvement, the more clearly I saw the effect he had on others. One day Cemal’s tailor showed me the running tab in his ledger. The figures were astounding. The man looked at me long and hard, and then shook his head as he pointed to the last figure noted: “It was only yesterday that I refunded him two hundred lira. He insisted . . .” And then, as if gripped by sudden madness, he made a terrifying display of tearing up the receipt. Three days later I saw Cemal Bey reprimand the tailor for a crease in the very suit he was wearing—though there was, if you ask me, no crease whatsoever—and I was flabbergasted by the poor man’s patience in the face of it. It was the sort of thing you wouldn’t believe unless you saw it with your own eyes. As he sank into shame, the poor man was almost swallowed up by his shoulders. And he kept saying, “As you wish, sir,” as if he had no other words.
He extracted money from his haberdasher, cobbler, and landlord in the same way. When his landl
ord finally mustered enough courage to remind his tenant that he owed two hundred liras in back rent, this poor browbeaten man was subjected to a vigorous lecture on a landlord’s sacred duties, which ended only when he promised to change the bathroom tiles and install glass around the back balcony. In his shrill Bosnian accent, Cemal Bey kept shrieking, “The tiles, the tiles!” Apparently the bathroom tiles didn’t match his madam’s nightgown. He made as if this terrible stroke of ill fortune had shaken him to his very core.
There was only one person in the Spiritualist Society who dismissed Cemal Bey’s imperial presence, and that was Mlle Aphrodite; in fact she did not even see it. With her smooth, firm skin and her thirty-two teeth flashing like flaming paraffin whenever she opened her mouth, and her suggestive eyes deepening beneath those long lashes like the setting sun, and a light and lilting accent (inherited from her Italian father) whose aftertaste—sharp as mustard—lodged in your throat but still lightened your heart with sweetness, and with her hands darting about without design but, like a spider, stunning all it touched, in wave after wave of warm allure, as she secured her conquest, she was, perhaps without knowing it, the pure embodiment of womanhood.
Every aspect of Aphrodite took the form of a command: she was inspiration personified, though she seemed sometimes saddened to be burdened with gifts she couldn’t hide.
On seeing Cemal Bey, she’d bring her hand to her cheek and pretend to shave as she squealed, “Ouch! I’ve just cut myself!” before taking shameless flight to my office, or to the kitchen, where she’d rest against the closed door to giggle in that mustardy voice. We could forgive her playful provocations, for none of us doubted their intent. We all knew that what drove her away from Cemal Bey was an absolute and insuperable disgust. And she made no secret of it:
“What am I supposed to do? I just can’t stand the man. There’s something so repugnant about him. I don’t know what.”
But Cemal Bey, who ignored all this, remained kind and condescending, affecting an air that seemed to say, “Beauty and Youth will always forgive such faults. How could we blame such a creature so pitifully ignorant and uneducated?” But in fact he found her behavior upsetting, grating as it did against the pride he wore like armor. Cemal Bey was a proud man and such pride is always kept close at hand, where it is most visible: it is the rich man’s automobile, the general’s aide-de-camp, the policeman’s revolver, the traffic warden’s whistle. No one could engage with him in any way without sensing this pride or thinking about it obsessively or feeling deeply disturbed.
When Aphrodite was twenty, her mother fell gravely ill, after which time the girl spent her evenings at her bedside. One evening she began scribbling something on a table in the room; not finding this odd, she did the same thing at just the same hour the following evening, and the next, without quite knowing what she was doing. When, on the morning after the third night, Aphrodite realized what was happening, she took a closer look at the pages she’d assumed were nothing but thoughtless scribbles, and between the doodles and the crooked words she spied a sentence: “Find a new doctor!” Too frightened at first to breathe a word to anyone, she confided in a friend, following which, and upon the insistence of an uncle then residing in their home, they found a new doctor—and her mother was saved.
From then, all she had to do was sit down at a desk with pencil in hand for a few minutes before starting her involuntary scribbling. At first her writing was no more than disjointed, meaningless words jumbled together into obtuse sentences, but with time they came to focus on a wide range of topics: there were news flashes on current events and personal or family matters, and even commentaries on city life. After testing this newfound talent on several friends, and at the insistence of the society, she came to learn how, by concentrating her powers on particular points of interest, she could find the answers people were likely to accept.
Before long, she would find herself yanked out of bed by an overwhelming force, to be dragged to her desk to fill page after page. She often wrote all night long, but by morning neither the authoress nor her friends could make any sense of her scribbling. Sometimes they found no more than a tangled string of meaningless words, names, and numbers—with the numbers 17 and 153 occurring most frequently. She wrote in a smattering of Italian, Greek, French, and Turkish.
Aphrodite’s father was Genoese. An event of major significance in his youth having put his life in danger, he had no choice but to flee to Izmir, and from there to Istanbul, where he married a Greek girl and settled down. He was a fine jeweler and an excellent tenor. He opened a very popular little shop near the funicular in Beyoglu and soon enough he became a man of means. But he severed all ties with his family because he didn’t feel safe, even after so much time had passed. So it was only when he died in 1915 that people found out he was Genoese and had a mother, father, and sister living in Italy. When Scarrechi died, his brother-in-law (formerly his apprentice) took over the running of the business, implementing changes during the Armistice years that transformed the little shop into an enormous shopping center. But by then the high craftsmanship of Aphrodite’s father’s time was a thing of the past. Customers to this vast and luxurious new emporium that employed the best goldsmiths in the trade still longed for the quality of his craftsmanship, or so it was said.
In the years following his death, Aphrodite and her mother brooded a great deal on the man’s early life and his relatives abroad. It was because she was curious to know about them that Aphrodite first undertook to advance her career as a spiritual medium. In the séances she conducted with friends, she concentrated her efforts on this matter in particular, and though its importance waned over time, she came to see that the force rousing her in the middle of the night (compelling her to roll back her eyes and give it voice in the indecipherable automatic writing she produced) was none other than her paternal aunt, who had died in 1923, still waiting for her brother and his family to return to their homeland at long last.
And then the pleas from the other side became clearer and the deceased more direct in applying pressure:
“Why won’t you come? Why won’t you come live with us in our home? Why won’t you come to collect your inheritance?” she scolded them. “I never married. I lived on next to nothing, saving it all for you. Why won’t you come?”
Aphrodite’s poor mother knew nothing about her husband other than that he had once lived in Genoa, under a certain name, so she was reluctant to accept these ever-more-insistent invitations: it was out of the question, and, anyway, she did not possess a single official document that established her as a member of his family. But soon enough she gave way to her determined daughter and the insistent community to which Aphrodite belonged; when she at last capitulated, she said, “Well, if nothing else, we’ll have gone on a journey.” Whereupon, following a string of strange and startling coincidences, the matter of the inheritance was settled with some ease.
As it turned out, there really wasn’t much of a fortune. Along with a modest sum of money the woman had saved, she’d left behind two houses on a long and narrow street, numbers 17 and 153. Yet the costs incurred by Aphrodite and her mother on their journey came to more than the value of both properties combined. Even so, it was a source of great pride to them that they had succeeded in their quest, and under circumstances that knew no precedent: in this they were a great inspiration to others. They could not help but be impressed by the many sacrifices this relative had made to hold on to these two fully furnished homes for so many years. She’d made her living running a boarding house and tatting her own lace—her legacy included vast quantities of the stuff. But, sadly, the woman’s obsession with collecting and hoarding meant the houses themselves were in rather poor condition.
Aphrodite and her mother didn’t have the heart to sell these properties that had come to them by such a bizarre route, and as neither of them was willing to follow the old auntie’s directive to resettle in Italy—in any event their liv
elihoods were in Istanbul—they oversaw a little restoration work on the houses and left.
From that day on, the aunt was nowhere to be found. Whenever Aphrodite had a free moment she would sit down at her desk and take hold of her pen with softly furrowed brow and creased forehead, there to wait as her countenance turned as hard as marble, her every contour erased, and thus she would wait for hours on end for her loving aunt to communicate with her once more.
She never reappeared. It was as if, freed of her heavy burden, this self-sacrificing soul had at last allowed herself to drift off into the pure sleep that she had been promised. And she deserved so much. She had devoted her entire life to her lost brother and his children, though they lived so very far away. In truth, she’d never known how many children he had or if he had any at all, for that matter, but all the same she always set aside for them all that she came to own, with her eyes forever fixed on the horizon so that she might say to them upon their return, “This is your home, and here is everything that I have saved for you.”
Even in death she remained mindful of her sacred mission; lost in the eternal void, and bereft of clues, she continued to search for her brother far and wide, until, after untold years, she found her way to the bedside of the young girl, Aphrodite. This alone should have been cause for thanks.
But it was not enough for Aphrodite. Having bound herself up in her auntie’s will—the Spiritualist Society had named her the Will—she longed for her return, and her continuing absence plunged the young woman into misery. She hadn’t even been able to thank her properly; not even had she said, “But, dear Auntie, why so much trouble? If only you knew how very touched we were by your sacrifices . . .” With time, a certain sort of sorrow ate into her expressions of gratitude:
“What’s it to me, an inheritance? I have my own money. Why did she go to so much trouble? Why didn’t she just get married? How could someone do such a thing? She did all this, but why hasn’t she come back to me?”