Kantika, page 3
Alberto stayed in Manchester for ten years and six months (to be safe), with only the occasional brief visit home. It felt like a due and proper penance. England did not, as they said over there, suit him. It was gray and cold with tasteless food, and the language was difficult and held no charm. The gentile woman’s husband returned from India. Alberto developed a connoisseur’s interest in rare fabrics and learned to say fustian, brocade and velveteen, and stand at his spot in the Cotton Yard in a fez (should he add a snake in a basket, or a hookah pipe?) and broker deals, but the business world bored him, and numbers had never been his strength. It was during this time that he, never more than a passable student at the Talmud Torah and Alliance schools of his youth, began to read and study at night in his rooming house, first to improve his English and then, when a friend from Salonica lent him books in Ladino, Hebrew and French, to read the great Jewish thinkers. He found in the words of Saadia Gaon, Judah Halevi and especially Maimonides a way to think deeply and logically about things that mattered but also to find a path back to El Dyo, who had left him or whom he’d left, despite the fact that even before becoming a student of religion, he’d attended services at the Sephardic synagogue on Cheetham Hill Road because the pink marble columns and Moorish arch were the closest things, among all that gray, to home.
* * *
AFTER THE DIVORCE, which took a good bit of money but was otherwise uncomplicated, he returned, to his relief, to Constantinople, a place he’d missed every day of his long absence. He came across Sultana barefoot and hanging laundry, of all things, when he was out walking on the island of Büyükada, where he had joined his parents on summer holiday. He’d been living the life of a bachelor for some years by then. He worked by day and frequented the cabarets, coffeehouses and bars by night, playing backgammon, poker and chess, gambling, discussing, disputing, listening to and playing music. Singing with the other men. After the bars, he read, and after he read, he prayed, and sometimes he prayed more than he drank, and other times he drank more than he prayed. Either way, the two things never felt at odds. On Friday nights and Saturday mornings, he went to the Ahrida synagogue, and most mornings he prayed at the small neighborhood kal, where he could also catch up with friends and discuss business over coffee served by a barefoot servant boy with a faint mustache. Every month, he sent money by way of a courier to Djentil Nahon, and if business was good, he sent a little more, and if bad, a little less. No one seemed particularly interested in arranging a match for him, not after he’d divorced his wife, and he was leery of marriage anyway and living, not unhappily, with his parents.
Sultana might, with her fresh face and bare arms piled high with laundry, have been a hired maid, but something stopped him—her goodness, maybe, or her sturdiness (unlike Djentil Nahon, she had some flesh on her bones), and the sea breeze ruffling her skirt and hair. He spoke to her and she answered that yes, it was a beautiful day, and he detected a slight lilt to her voice inside her Spanyol, a twang almost, a different kind of up-and-down. It turned out that she was no maid but a girl from a prosperous family who had spent much of her childhood in Ireland. Her father, Behor Camayor, was a successful tobacco merchant (upon his death, the Irish Embassy would bring in six white horses dressed in gold to pull the carriage that held his casket), and the family had gone back and forth among Ireland, Turkey and Malta until finally her father retired and came home. Might she like to go for ice cream later? She looked so young, he was afraid she would say no, but she said yes.
They spoke a fluid mix of French and Ladino together, but English was their secret language. “I’m a wee bit tired,” she’d say to him at the dinner table at his parents’ house, and he’d know it was time for a walk to the park, where they could neck in the shadows of the trees. She was quick and lively, hardworking, reasonable and full of affection, sane, and she didn’t seem to judge him for having divorced another woman, though she felt terribly sorry for Djentil. She liked that he was bookish (though she was not particularly) and that he sang and played music. They married for love in the Ahrida synagogue, and because he had been living with his parents and was not a young man and she brought a good dowry, they could afford a house on the top of the hill in Fener. Soon, she gave birth to Corinne, then Rebecca, then Isidoro. Alberto came into more money from a bachelor uncle’s death, and they bought the summer house in Büyükdere, which was not on the Princes’ Islands, where most of their circle spent the summer, but it had a sprawling garden and was in an elite neighborhood near the summer embassies and not far from the city (he could, when duty called, commute an hour to work by boat), and you didn’t run into your cousin or your cousin’s cousin every time you stepped outside.
After that, Sultana lost two babies, to a miscarriage and a stillbirth, so that when her next child was born, a healthy boy, Alberto let her bend to old custom and send the infant off to live with relatives for a few days, and he came back dressed like a prince and with a new, second-chance name, Marko, which meant “sold.” Elsa came next. Alberto didn’t deserve it, but for some reason, El Dyo saw fit to bless him, so he tried to run a good business, balance the books and provide for his family. And he did, mostly, for a long time, though as the children multiplied and his responsibilities grew, so did his need for outside distractions. Not women—he wouldn’t betray Sultana, though there was no harm in looking—but frequenting his old haunts, the bars, baths, coffeehouses, and perhaps most of all, mucking in his garden.
“Let us wander through the garden air and savor the smell of thistles and roses,” wrote his beloved poet Judah Halevi. It was a deep, oddly forbidden pleasure to leave work in the middle of the day and hide in the garden for an hour or so when no one was home, Sultana at her mother’s or doing charity work, the children with her or the nanny or at school, and he might rake or deadhead, prune or transplant, plant a new breed of tulip he’d ordered from Holland, wearing gloves so his hands wouldn’t give him away, though sometimes he shed the gloves, wanting to touch the earth, and sometimes his trousers got smeared with dirt. Later, Sultana might see and roll her eyes—you’re worse than the children!—but it was hardly a vice as vices went. Still, it might have been sex, it filled him up so, but gardening also brought him closer to God, erasing his worries and replacing them with blind roots descending, pale shoots rising, the onionskin sheath of a bud whose time was its own; it would open when it opened, shed its shroud.
So maybe he neglected to woo some potential new clients. Maybe the business stopped growing and began contracting. Times were increasingly tough—not just for him, but for everyone. When the stress at work became too much, he’d go play poker, chess or backgammon for high stakes, winning just often enough to convince himself that gambling was a rational response to the situation (losing more, the cash disappearing as if his pockets had sprung holes, though Sultana kept his clothes in good repair now that they didn’t have money to pay a seamstress for new suits). Times are hard. Times are not what they were. Was it his fault if happenstance was transforming him into (some piece of him even liked the notion of it) a fin de siècle, end-of-empire kind of man? His father had died by then and was not there to disapprove. Sultana had asked him not to gamble, but women couldn’t frequent the clubs and the men covered for one another, and there was always—for a long time there was—enough money, so how was she to know?
If shame followed him around, coming out of the shadows on occasion to nip at his heels, so, equally, did pride. He discussed his troubles with no one. He dressed nattily, no matter the occasion, and walked with his shoulders squared. He kept moving, winding through his city, across neighborhoods where people knew him and tipped their caps, and ones where he was pleasantly anonymous. Sometimes he’d stop at a coffeehouse, or he’d amuse himself on a street corner with a simple game of chance that involved reaching into a cloth sack and pulling out a button, different colors yielding different prizes—ball, pipe, rag doll painted with the sultan’s face. He’d come home with gifts for the children: Pick a hand, any hand! How they clamored, reaching, grabbing, so he’d stay for a little, then unpry their sticky, acquisitive hands—“Let go now, rascals, your papa has an important meeting”—and leave to wander once again.
IV
IN REBECCA’S TENTH YEAR, Djentil Nahon’s mother dies. They learn about it from Nurie, Lika’s mother, who, with Lika, has taken the ferry from the city to the summer house in Büyükdere to stay the week. The girls are in the garden, charged, along with Corinne, with watching over Rebecca’s younger siblings, when they hear the two mothers on the veranda discussing the old lady’s passing. The community has apparently set up a fund for the tombstone, but Djentil can’t be trusted with arrangements, and doesn’t her family have money from somewhere, they used to anyway, and wasn’t there a sister in France and a brother in America, but nobody visits, the Nahons used to own the whole house, then sold off one floor, then another. Sad. How can her family abandon her like that? Who’s left?
During the school year, the girls’ visits to Tiya Djentil had dropped off but not stopped entirely. Rebecca is relieved that they weren’t in the apartment when the old lady drew her last breath.
“Sorry to say so, but she already seemed dead—she was five minutes to twelve!” Lika whispers, using a phrase of their mothers’, and together they laugh, but then Rebecca tries to unsay Lika’s “dead” before it brings bad luck. “You mean alive,” she says, bugging her eyes out at her friend, who looks briefly baffled, before saying, “Oh, right. She seemed alive. Very alive! Oh yes she did.”
Eventually they lose interest and are obliged, anyway, to chase down Elsa, who has pulled herself up onto the garden wall while the boys play at swords under the linden tree and Corinne ignores everyone, head in a book, as the lizards freeze on the stones to watch them all. Then, from deep in the bushes, their father appears, dripping with sweat, almost glowing in his gardening hat and gloves. He yells harshly at the boys to stop their fighting and climbs the steps to the veranda, flinging his arms apart, as if to separate Sultana from Nurie, though they’re just standing there talking, two mild mothers in floral dresses on a summer day.
Everything stops; even the little ones know to listen. Then their father is screaming loud enough for the neighbors to hear. Enough, don’t bring me more shame, listen to me, there will be no fund from the community! How dare they—how dare you speak of this and bring me shame? Rebecca’s mother says shhh, of course, you’re right, darling, and calm down, and please, Alberto, the children, and at that he wheels around and stares, as if noticing his children and Lika for the first time.
“Lo syento,” he apologizes, then repeats it to his wife, and a third time to Lika’s mother, Nurie, sounding almost tearful. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I lost my head, please pardon me.”
But he doesn’t stop after that, just switches to English, the words, if slightly calmer, sharp and nasal, with t’s that spit. Tiya Nurie gathers the children—“Come, we’re going to see the boats, and if you’re good, I’ll buy you ice cream”—pairing littles with bigs as she herds them out the gate, though they’re all thinking not of ice cream but of two repeated words: Djentil Nahon, Djentil Nahon.
* * *
THAT FALL, AFTER THEY RETURN in the city, Tiya Djentil calls and calls for Rebecca and Lika, not once or twice a week, but day and night now, banging on her floor (Lika’s ceiling), yelling out the window, and while at first she refers to them as her suvrinas, nieces, as has been her custom, soon she starts calling them her daughters: “Come, m’ijikas, I’ve got an errand for you to run! Come right now, I’ve made you treats!”
Their mothers agree that Djentil Nahon has truly lost her wits, and while they keep an eye on the poor woman and make sure she doesn’t starve, they instruct their daughters to stay away. She can go out for herself, says Nurie, now that she doesn’t have to care for her mother. It’s good for her to leave the house. The charity ladies, Sultana and Nurie among them, add her to their rotation. Rebecca and Lika don’t protest; in fact, they are relieved. They are growing up, too old to spend their time visiting a crazy spinster, and the nuns have told them that too much sugar gives them spots, but more than that, Djentil scares them now, wanting them too badly, believing too much in the unseen, calling Mama, Mama into the night. Lika, for all her scientific objectivity, says she can’t stop seeing the old lady still lying on the bed, flesh rotting, which disgusts her, and did Djentil Nahon tell anyone right away, and did she sew the shroud herself, and what if her mother’s ghost returns? We should stay away from someone like that, Lika says with surprising coldness. We never should have called her tiya.
For her part, Rebecca feels sadness, coupled with a failing of belief, because how can you live in a world so peopled and storied that spoons have spirits and girls have wings, but then your own mother dies and you simply cannot find her, not in a spoon, not in a rug, not anywhere, and the girls who used to visit are not your daughters, not even your nieces, and don’t come see you anymore, and the only man who ever married you is married now to someone else. For a while, Djentil Nahon still calls and bangs, bangs and calls. Then one day she stops. So it’s over, just like that. Occasionally, Rebecca and Lika see her on the street, graying curls loose down her back, muttering into her basket or stopping to yank weeds from cracks, but she looks right through them, as if she no longer knows who they are.
* * *
REBECCA TURNS TWELVE. She registers the changes first as an internal thinning, a brittleness of thought and mood in inverse proportion to the spread and curve of her body. Her father comes home one evening and announces that she must give up gymnastics because he disagrees with Maccabi’s focus on Palestine, which he views not only as a betrayal of their country but also as a false messianism not so different from the Sabbateans—he’s taught her about them, was she listening, does she remember who they are? Yes, but it’s not about that, Papa, Rebecca says. I’m getting so good, I’m one of the best. We have a performance coming up to raise money for the Turkish Fleet! I won’t have you parading in front of people, he says. And believe me, the Turkish Fleet is just a front.
She appeals to him the next day but to no avail, and she cannot look to her mother for support because she’s sick in bed from having had surgery after another difficult delivery. So now there’s Josef, but Rebecca has had enough of babies, and her maternal grandmother is staying with them, making her fetch clothes and change diapers, and the baby spits up everywhere and cries a lot. Lika, whose mother has been blessed with a late-in-life baby boy after years of only having Lika, takes a job in a sewing notions shop because her scholarship at Sion has been reduced. Rebecca goes to school, comes home, does her chores and baby-minding, stays up late bent over homework. Sometimes on Sunday afternoons, she and Lika meet to dress up their baby brothers in comical outfits and take them in their prams along the shore, but the girls are too old for dolls, and unlike dolls, their brothers are a lot of trouble and can’t be left alone if you get bored with them, so the pleasure quickly wears thin.
Still, there are advantages to growing older. Corinne begins to talk to Rebecca again, offering her advice or requesting that her sister braid her hair and coil it into an intricate bun. One day Sultana allows Rebecca to have a dress made—her wardrobe, except for her annual High Holidays outfit, is mostly hand-me-downs from Corinne. Rebecca works with the dressmaker, Amada Almaleh, on designing a sailor suit (she has always loved the jaunty, voyage-ready look) in dark blue raw silk with a red tie, princess waist and pearled buttons. She is told she has a keen eye for design and is invited to spend several afternoons each week at the dressmaker’s shop, helping with the sewing lessons the dressmaker gives to little girls and learning tailoring techniques.
At kal and social gatherings, boys notice her, and one day, she goes on a picnic with Lika’s extended family and meets, among other cousins, a boy named Sabetay Levy but called Samuel, who takes them in a paddleboat around a little pond, where they circle among swans and ducks. Samuel tells them about swans—how there are none in Africa or Antarctica, how they mate for life—and tracks Rebecca’s movements with his eyes. Afterward, she asks Lika about him—where does he live, where does he go to school?—and Lika says Ortaköy, he had to drop out of school to work, his father ran off, they’re terribly poor, a story that clashes with the fact-filled, nicely dressed boy and the sun on their hair and Rebecca’s sense that, though the boat circled sleepily, they were all three headed toward bright futures. A pity, she tells her friend. He might have been someone. Lika bristles—everyone is someone before God—and Rebecca says, of course, that’s not what I meant, even as she removes Lika’s cousin from her mind.
* * *
ON NOVEMBER 14, 1914, she arrives at school to find a large sign on the front door: VACANCE DE GUERRE. For a moment, seeing the rushed, handwritten lettering, a childlike scrawl, she thinks it is a prank. But no: A real guard stands there, knees locked, shoulders squared. The adults’ faces are ashen; Corinne grabs Rebecca and Lika tightly by their hands. Rebecca twists toward the sign, doubting her French. How can a war be a vacation? And which war anyway (the Balkan Wars, for which they wound bandages and knit scarves, are over, at least she thinks so)? She feels a flutter of perverse excitement—no school today!—even as she registers a chalky presentiment of loss.
