Free Many and Many a Year Ago by Selcuk Altun

that moment on I could be little more than a zombie. Esther was the vital half of my body and soul. The inner paralysis that lay in wait for me was too horrible to contemplate.
    â€œMy sister ignored my depression. As far as she was concerned I had brought dishonor to the family because I had turned forty-five and was still unmarried. I couldn’t bear it. I decided to move out and asked for my share of our inheritance. She swore that our father had left no cash and when I found out for myself that she wasn’t lying I felt sick. I also learned that the law prevented me from forcing the sale of the apartment. I left on bad terms and moved in with a widower colleague of mine who lived in university housing. Your apartment’s former owner, Izak, had been a school friend of Esther’s and mine. When he told me that the flat beneath his old place was up for sale I bought it, heedless of the debt it would saddle me with. I moved here about twenty years ago.
    â€œThe pain of losing Esther eased little by little. I couldn’t mourn for her because she’d locked herself within me. We fell asleep in each other’s arms at night; in the morning she was the first thing I saw in the mirror. It made me feel good when I heard her voice in my ear or noticed her smile across the table at a restaurant. If I heaved a sigh, I murmured her name along with it. If the music was anything other than her favorite Nat King Cole I didn’t listen to it. Whenever I heard the
ezan
I turned my face toward the city walls and stared. If I went out, my legs would involuntarily take me to our old hangouts. Esther was no longer my illegitimate wife for a month each June, she was my beloved who lived and breathed with me twenty-four hours a day. She might leave the room when I was lecturing or reading the papers or watching TV, but then she would re-enter and passionately embrace the whole of my existence.
    â€œI’m sure I haven’t expressed myself very well. But to make a long story short, my dear neighbor, my beloved’s death turned the flame of love in my heart into an eternally glowing ember. To honour her memory, I retired and went into seclusion here. Now I teach part-time and translate romantic novels under a pseudonym, though it does worry me that I might discover a deeper passion than my own …”
*
    The professor’s words had left me moved. Under that mask of melancholy was a philosophical heart, and what he wanted to convey to me was that I shouldn’t dwell on my sufferings but, like Tanya from Lvov, persist in the search for true love, regardless of the outcome. Who was it said, “Ah, how sad they were, the happiest days of my life”? Well anyway, those words were on my mind as I returned to my study and put on Brahms’ Sonata No. 2.
    A book fell from one of the library shelves. It was
The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
. Inside it was an envelope containing six photographs stuck together with Scotch tape. On the front of the first three were question marks; on the other three were “X’s”. The pretty girl smiling at the camera must have been Suat’s girlfriend, the one who died in the fire. On the back of each picture someone had written, pressing hard with a red pencil, a different stanza of Poe’s mysterious poem.
    I felt compelled to read it twice:
Annabel Lee
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
I
was a child and
she
was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love that was more than love—
I and my Annabel Lee—
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.
And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsmen came
And