Free Istanbul Was a Fairy Tale by Mario Levi Page B

people, sharing different lives. The long years ahead would fling open the gates for a new love, for a love even more arduous. But Olga’s attachment to Henry was to remain despite all the trials and tribulations she would have to undergo; it was an attachment beyond the dimensions of love. In other words, Olga’s relationship with Henry never broke despite her involvement with different people and the upsurge of different expectations. It was not an end, however. It just couldn’t be. It simply was placed in a different compartment of her life, a compartment that could not easily be acknowledged by other people at large. Henry was to recognize the grave error he had committed in parting with Olga years later, after having to endure irreparable losses . . . in those years, in the wake of these losses, he was to find himself immersed in great agonies and black despair . . . Actually, despite the glossy countenance of it, Henry’s story was one of hopeless failure, a washout, a debacle . . . a story of being swept up by a flood; he had perceived this truth almost immediately after his severance from her. He had gone to Vienna in pursuit of a woman with whom he had been in correspondence with for quite some time but about whom nobody could give any satisfactory information. In his old age, when his behavior had become erratic, he would live with her in Istanbul; they had watched the sunset on the Pierre Loti hill and made love dreaming of a seaside resort on the Bosporus. However, the fatal day had come and the woman finally realized that she could no longer go on living like that; she became aware of the fact that she intrinsically belonged to the Vienna which she had left and went back to her husband, a man thirty years older than herself. Actually, she was a countess, a genuine one whose lifestyle matched the standing she had justifiably regained. All things considered, her love affair was a desperate business. They had set out on a wild goose chase only to realize soon after that they’d been pursuing a will o’ the wisp . . . Was that the place where the storms and tempests had originated? Time tried everybody in different fashions. That Viennese woman, that ancient ‘lady of the mansions,’ a widow whose aspirations had been to crown her life with revelries and balls and whose songs attracted innumerable philanderers, would cause Henry’s ostensibly inexhaustible wealth to be squandered in a haze of delight brought about by sham victories, paving the way in due course for loans borrowed from old friends whenever he chanced to run into them, and from his distant relatives, even from the clerks who had once been in his employ, with a view to pandering to his whims and saving himself from starvation, loans which were never to be paid back. His settlement at the old people’s home at Hasköy by the good auspices of Olga, who never deserted him, coincided with the days when he was destitute. His last affair would henceforth be with a woman, a former teacher of French, to be precise, a woman who claimed to have once been a teacher and who considered speaking French as a sign of nobility, like her contemporaries, and who resolutely awaited an illusory visitor; a woman who never went out to take some fresh air in the city, flatly asserting that Istanbul was not her Istanbul anymore. In the midst of the fantasies of women proliferating in his imagination, each reminding him of a different defeat, he would live to fight another day in full consciousness of the fact that his flights and pretenses would lead him nowhere except to Olga. The existence of that woman, of another woman, was necessary for him to cover up his defeat. Olga was aware of this. To propagate life endlessly, to protract the climax of the stage play making sure that it does not reach its catharsis, postponing death in chambers one has taken refuge in, such illusory visions should appear normal; especially if we remember our inability to strip ourselves