Why, then, oh why, was he trying to knock down her door? Because of the elevator. Because now, in order to throw out the fish, he’d have to take the elevator. And for my father, few modern conveniences were more terrifying.
12.
It was rumored that Turk had acquired a foreign exchange student from some sweltering Oriental backwater where the plant-based diet and nonexistent child labor laws made sure that no one got bigger than an average American ten-year-old. Had anyone ever laid eyes on the exchange student? Perhaps. Fleetingly. All anyone knew for sure was that he was small. Service Swensen, the talkies actress and self-appointed hall monitor who lived in 14A, claimed she had seen him, but, her cataracted peephole eye lacking the ability to tell one Chinaman from the next, she had, in fact, misidentified a delivery boy from Grand Szechuan, the kitchen of which fed fully half the Apelles on Friday nights and had a lock on a quarter of the residents most other nights of the week, and whose employees were as common in the hallways as the residents themselves. Service, who spent much of her day with that cloudy eye pressed to the brass plate in her door, spooning peanut butter into her toothless mouth, had, in fact, on numerous occasions seen the exchange student, our friend Tanawat Kongkatitum, but in every instance assumed him to be a Grand Szechuan delivery boy. For the record, Tanawat was six feet tall.
Turk’s history and my own are a tangle of confluence and coincidence. She was our neighbor, of course, and still is. She was not, as my father claimed in one of the many confabulations he visited on me when I was a girl, Turkish, and though she laughed along with the stories of Ottoman conquest he told me about her, her name was short for Turlough, itself an Anglicized bastardization of Toirdhealbhach, after the blind Irish harper, a national hero, a name chosen by Turk’s German parents in a post–Great War attempt to shield their child from the misanthropy they expected to be visited upon her by her American classmates.
Turk was plenty American, having emigrated in utero, in the aftermath of the Kaiser’s fall, born red white and blue in 1920 (a smack on der Hintern cleared up the blue). Brothers Seamus and Teddy arrived in ’22 and ’24. Turk’s father, formerly a professor of Eastern languages in Bonn, had established a successful language school in Manhattan, then expanded to Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, the last leading to a lucrative government contract training diplomatic attachés heading to the territories. In the late 1920s, the Brunn Institute for Linguistic and Cultural Advancement was the height of intellectual fashion in New York, offering exotic languages such as Hindi, Japanese, Tibetan, Basque, Maa, and Dinka, taught by native speakers who administered pronunciation drills while wearing native dress, and it was not unusual to find classrooms packed on Friday evenings with flappers and swells, who after class would catch a drink and practice the dirty Mandarin phrases they’d been able to extract from their teacher before diving into the oily night. (Lie la zhoo ta ma da!) The schools survived the thirties by floating along on meager government contracts, and when war broke out in Europe, Roosevelt’s Department of State enlisted Turk’s father to increase the readiness of the diplomatic corps. Then the world fell apart and the diplomats were replaced by recruits from the newly formed Office of Strategic Services.
That’s where our family histories first crossed, when my father enrolled in a class to brush up on Polish slang.
Turk and her two younger brothers spent the war unencumbered by concerns more dire than canned pineapple shortages. She cruised through college, picked up master’s degrees in anthropology and sociology, and enrolled in a doctoral program at Columbia (the family business: her unfinished dissertation was titled “Twentieth-century linguistic transformation of the Bahau Dayak”). By the early 1960s, Turk was a familiar face in the West Village bars where NYU professors took their latest conquests, where everyone was arguing politics, high as kites, throwing poses, doing their best impersonations of credible sources.
Who was she to that crowd? A dyke, a cipher, perpetual ABD, here and there auditing a class at the New School, versed in Schopenhauer and Friedman but bored by both, someone who always picked up the check and always went home alone. She smoked with her cigarette wedged tightly into the webbing of her index and middle fingers, and she wore dungarees and a leather jacket, which once led an empress dowager at the Apelles to remark in a public whisper that Turk might as well have been a dockworker. Turk volleyed back that given the spread of the old hag’s ass, she must herself be a welcome sight down at Pier 12.
Her concerns didn’t include the opinions of others; she detested those papery souls who attested at every opportunity that they couldn’t care less what people thought of them. Wouldn’t you be disappointed to know how seldom they do? she’d say. She was herself steadfast in her determination never to defer to the opinion of strangers or friends.
She didn’t need anyone, which worked like a magnet on both sexes. The lunatic fringe, poets, actors, the hip-pocket revolutionaries, bored housewives slumming it in the Village, the three-piece wool and steel-rim crowd looking for a girl and a room, the doe-eyed professors dreaming of Paris. She threaded her way in and out of them all.
By the time Turk was in her mid-forties, she was the lone resident of the sprawling apartment at the Apelles. Her mother had died and her father had been packed off to an institution in the Berkshires, suffering from a strange, possibly self-induced mania that caused him first to speak in tongues and then not at all.
Lazlo. Dear Lazlo. Because his strange story is essential to my strange story, I must tell you about him. Turk’s father, born Lazlo Friedrich Krupp, unraveled in 1961. At the time of his de facto resignation from his post at the Brunn Institute for Linguistics and Cultural Advancement and his commitment to the decidedly less gabby Pickering Institute for Psychiatric Care, there had been no signs of illness, no frailty beyond a hitch in his stride (bone spur, heel) that required a walking stick, and he’d continued to work quite happily until his collapse, precipitated by an unexplained physical event. One night Turk had come home late, peeked in on him at his desk, where, still wearing his Koss SP/3 headphones, he appeared to have nestled down for a nap, and she’d gone to her room to get out of her rain-wet clothes before she returned to his study to rouse him.
If he’d suffered a heart attack or a stroke, it was certainly one of the more genteel in medical history, as he was arranged in the manner of a chem major catching a few winks in his carrel, head atop neatly folded arms. The rain was trickling down the bow window, projecting colloidal shadows that drained up the back of Lazlo’s tweed suit coat, through the gossamer atop his head, wiggling like tadpoles across the various texts spread out before him, through the glass jar of pencils, across stacks of tape reels, the gray tape decks, the row of books barricading the far side of the desk, over the sill, before meeting again at the glass their progenitors. She’d not been at his desk in several weeks, and it was hard to ignore the unusual symmetry of the items atop it.
Her father had bisected the space so that on the right were Urdu texts: academic papers, brochures, recipes, maps, and notebooks filled with glossaries, phrases, grammatical rules. A couple of primers on the German language for the ambitious speaker of Urdu. On the left were German texts on Urdu. On both sides were translations of original texts into the correlative language. The collected poems of Khawaja Haider Ali Aatish in both tongues. A two-volume original and translation of Baḥrul faṣāhat, Najmul Ghani’s treatise on versification. Also sprach Zarathustra