A long time ago, one morning, contrary to habit, I had woken up before my parents. I didn’t dare wake them, so I munched on some food and left. I walked along the shore of the Golden Horn. If I had to describe that walk, I think it best to put it in terms of music. I heard sounds, sometimes sharp, sometimes soft as silk, something between a song and a lament, like the melody of the haziness I was feeling around me for the first time. Yet it was a crystal clear morning, with the sky reflecting on the Golden Horn like a tree shaping its own shadow. But then, it is a difficult business, conveying the feelings that Istanbul evokes.
Without a doubt, though, I had heard that strange melody. Then the noise of cars and fishing boats ruined it all, and I headed back. That morning, a few minutes after coming home, I found my father and mother in bed, completely still, their eyes fixed on the ceiling.
My memories aren’t that clear at this point. The bedroom was a pool of gelatinous blood, that I remember very well. Yes, a sea of frozen blood, thawing, trickling, thinning. Even a heart of stone could cease to beat in a place saturated with fear, and though I stood very close, I could not bring myself to touch the bodies. I don’t know which I was more afraid of, death itself or the stain it would leave; it was as if I was frozen right there.
Before he was killed, my father had left home late every night for a week. Sometimes he would just pace up and down the street, sometimes he would disappear from view as soon as he was out the door. It wasn’t disturbing; in fact, it was rather exciting. I became a bit obsessed with his whereabouts, and so I decided to follow him one night. I left after him. I was like a jinn in human form, burning with curiosity. Where was my father going? Who was he going to meet? He turned toward the Bulgarian church, which looked like a present forgotten there on the shore, wrapped in shiny paper. I went after him, the breeze striking my face as I turned each corner. My father was walking briskly, his head down. Suddenly, he turned around and saw me. He couldn’t have heard my footsteps, I was walking so gently.
“Son... are you following me?”
I stopped dead in my tracks, my head spinning at the shock of having been caught. I was looking at the gate in front of that silvery church, the marble steps winding up to the entrance, at the dark waters a little further ahead and the flood of city lights reflected upon them. Gradually, everything became blurry; everything except for my father’s eyes, which shone in the dark. His face was close to mine.
“You should be in bed at this hour,” he said, “let’s go home.”
He was so enigmatic, the way he terminated so many of his relationships so quickly, and how he gave everybody such a hard time with his stoic stubbornness. In those days, a kind of mental connection was forming between my father and me. From the outside, one would have thought that we were just a father and son who got on well, communicating by normal verbal means. But the truth was, ours was a silent pact, arrived at somewhere deep down, as if we shared some profound secret.
I spent my whole day in Fener wandering around amongst ruins and run-down buildings. The impression left by the building in which I grew up was quite painful. Still, I had been able to shake off the listlessness and melancholia, to overcome my lack of courage. Yet there seemed to be a kind of denial at the core of the word “life,” such that it wouldn’t tolerate any middle-of-the-road options. How can I put it? The shell of that word was too tough, impenetrable; it was keeping me out. A language beyond words, an unsound logic had created such a very private, impermeable realm, even the waves of all the past that I could possibly imagine whirling about me were for naught.
The nightlife of the neighborhood was about to begin. Once darkness had finally descended upon the city, in each and every sound I heard, I began discerning melodies, which I recalled very clearly from my past, and which made Fener that much more real to me. They weren’t only sounds I had heard before, but other sounds too, the imagined voices of people I knew only in name, voices of people who lived centuries ago, and the voice of death, still alive in my mind. They would not be denied, would not be suppressed. It was a world of sounds, a different world, existing in the depths of words, moans, whispers, and silences, a world that did not reciprocate the passion of he who listened and observed with feeling.
Such was my strange emotional state when I arrived in front of the Fener Greek Archdiocese. Perhaps it, too, was infected with the same irrationality. The guard at the door looked me square in the face. I sensed a familiarity hidden in that strange expression.
“Are you trying to find someone?” he asked.
It was a momentary thing, a lie I would never own up to. “Yes,” I said, “did you see a tall guy with white hair in a suit and a woman with red hair?”
“No,” he replied, “we aren’t receiving visitors to the Archdiocese right now. There’s no one inside.”
The important thing was that I was feeling happy at that moment, and that happiness could be made possible only by means of a lie. Of course, I did what it took to keep the lie from getting out of hand; I turned and walked toward the sea. It was hard to ignore the lie; it was love embracing me generously, and truth seeping into the dark paradise of sadness, through a secret hole.
I returned to my hotel after wandering for a while by the shore. The next morning, I was enjoying the happiness of the seventh day, the day after creation. Solitude, the feeling of security because you are out of the reach, too far away to tend to the intrusions of daily life... It was a pleasure. I was having dinner in Fener, in a restaurant with a view of the Golden Horn. The people at the next table and I were putting on an ostentatious show of mutual respect. What an undeniable blessing these Fener evenings are, we were saying, the world at our command. Dinner took a long time; by the time we finished, the night had engulfed the entire city. We complicated even the simplest of things, especially the simple ones, with our labyrinthine words.
Some men of Fener are night owls; there is no shortage of people coming and going, right up to the moment when the restaurant door is padlocked. As the night wore on, I found myself sitting together with the people from the next table, deep in conversation. We were just about to finish our second bottle of rakı and call it a night, when an old man appeared at the door. He stood there and briefly scanned the place before deciding to enter, then he walked straight to our table.
“Good evening, gentlemen,” he said with a smile. “Enjoying the fare, I hope!”
Three from our table knew him. They introduced us to each other. A smile broadened across his face and his attention focused on me like a beam. “Vasili, you say! You still speak Turkish like your mother tongue!”
The other men at the table were taken by surprise, and I was too. The man was alert, like a fox, and was obviously eager to hear my response. But I was petrified.
“You are that Vasili, aren’t you?” he said. “Son of Yorgo. I knew your father. Do you remember me?”
At that moment, I concentrated upon the calm, serene face of the man, where time, in all its destructiveness, was hiding. His wrinkled face did remind me of something, but it was as if my memory was being swept away by a strong current, a current stronger than life itself, and was struggling to gain a foothold.
“Sorry, can’t seem to place you,” I said.
Perhaps he had more to say, but he remained quiet. He stood up, extended his arms, and hugged me tightly. His eyes were wet when he sat down. Truth be told, what could I say to him at that hour of the night, with that buzz in my head? Yet it was a precious opportunity; this old man was the first acquaintance I had stumbled upon in my neighborhood, which had been so thoroughly appropriated and alienated by time. He didn’t know where to place his huge hands. The heart-breaking zeal of this chance encounter induced a growing sense of disquiet. There was something cruel there in the twilight zone of that dimly lit meyhane. My heart filled with an unidentifiable longing, my mind with myriad possibilities.