Free Many and Many a Year Ago by Selcuk Altun Page A

bore her away from me
To shut her up in a sepulcher
In this kingdom by the sea.
The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me—
Yes!—that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.
But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we—
Of many far wiser than we—
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee:
For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee:
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,
In the sepulcher there by the sea—
In her tomb by the sounding sea.

IV
    Next morning I woke abruptly from a restless sleep. My head felt as if it was encased in a ball of thick fog. I found myself before the stereo with an urgent need to purge my soul of that story of shattered love. I sought solace in
Tristan und Isolde
…
*
    The professor and I began meeting every other day. Did this fact escape the sharp eyes of Sami, who surely noticed that I’d been drawn into Ali’s melancholy orbit? Ali’s invitations were actually a source of relief to me. I felt relaxed and reassured in his apartment. He would sometimes criticize my idleness while giving me cooking lessons, but I was honored even by this. And I wasn’t at all curious about whether he knew Suat. And when his eyes became fixed on a faraway point I knew it was time for him to be alone with Esther.
*
    I’d done my weekly shopping at the Balıkpazarı gourmet grocers like a jolly retiree. My good mood was ruined when I got home to find a gray-suited man with a briefcase at the front door. This small middle-aged man appeared annoyed at being kept waiting. He was obviously foreign. When he told me he was a lawyer from New York, I invited him in. I was excited, thinking he would have news of Suat.
    â€œI want to tell you why I’m here,” he said, stirring the warm milk he’d requested into his tea. “When the Red Army took over Russia, among the first refugees to seek asylum in the Ottoman Empire were First Lieutenant Vladimir—Vlad—Nadolsky and his brother, Lieutenant Maxim Nadolsky. We have to assume that they had with them a bag full of English pounds and precious jewelry. Their father, after all, was a wealthy count. The brothers’ aim was to settle in America as soon as possible. Maxim never imagined that he would have to go to the States alone when their visas finally came through after two and a half years. But Vlad had taken a job teaching French at a private school and had fallen in love with the married vice-principal. Zoe, as she was called, was unwilling to go with him to New York since it would mean leaving her paralyzed husband behind, so Vlad had to stay too. To be close to her, he rented the apartment that is now yours. Maxim was an ambitious but honest man; he made his brother a fifty percent partner in the import-export business he founded in his adopted country and, when the business flourished, sent Vlad enough money to live on comfortably. During the Second World War Vlad became foster father to an orphan named Haluk Batumlu. He loved him as a son, yet when the boy was expelled from university as a communist sympathizer, Vlad was quick to disown him. Meanwhile he continued to wait for Zoe’s husband to die so that he could marry her. But his beloved preceded him in death. So on his seventy-fifth birthday Vlad flew to New York to be near his brother. Maxim died in 1984 and his son Alex took over the company. Vlad died in his bed in 1999, aged 105. Except for the day on which the collapse of communism was announced, nobody had ever seen him