the foreign cinema
On the day Cenem resolved to finally see Los Angeles, she went to the used bookstore off Taksim Square in search of a copy of Baedecker’s California. The shop was known for its sizable collection of travel literature as well as its front window, which for years had been filled with a welter of jackknifed, yellowing books. Inside, there were no customers, only the heels of her shoes sounding on the wood planks, and no light to speak of other than the windows at her back. The air beneath the warped tin ceiling was heavy with mildew and the toasted scent of wood pulp, surfaces were cluttered with stray memoranda and windblown sheets of newspaper. On hearing her request, the owner, Osman, led her to the furthermost shelves where he located a well-used copy wedged between volumes of a treatise on North American geology. “Ah, California,” he said, admiring the frontispiece of mountains and orange trees. “Such a distant, intriguing locale.” When he inquired of her interest, Cenem told him she had a sister there, her eldest, whom she had not seen in decades. “An admirable aim,” he observed, handing her the book. “Two sisters, apart all those years. A journey of time more than distance it would seem.”
He was a bearish, melancholy man with thinning hair and an air of weary resignation that, in hindsight, had a certain appeal. She had done little in life but care for her parents, nursing first her father, then her mother in the same house in the Beyoglu district where she was born. She was not close to her sister, her eldest, Sofia, who married at sixteen and emigrated to the States the year Cenem turned five. And yet, Los Angeles had never seemed distant.
From a young age Cenem had spent Saturday afternoons at the sinemasi, and in that first year alone in the old house, indulged herself with double matinees, and if the mood struck, the late show. From her love of Hollywood film, Cenem knows Los Angeles well, its wide boulevards and winding streets, the mountains and hard light. By the time of her visit to Osman’s shop, she was determined to go, to see the place and the sister she’d been separated from since childhood. The journey was clear in her mind, all but how to pay for the ticket.
It was then, as the sale was transacted, that Osman mentioned a post he sought to fill, a qualified person who might put the shop in order. “The sort of person,” he said, casting her a weary smile, not put off by disarray.
She gazed past him, to the far wall. High shelves ran floor to ceiling, where books had been forced into every available space. Spines and page edges ran upright and edgewise, loosened book jackets slipped from their panels. On an ancient wool chesterfield, a set of thick volumes sat in crooked stacks on the cushions. Crates and boxes crowded the aisle, contents overspilling, waiting to be inventoried, priced, and shelved. In the end, Cenem stayed three years, at the age of fifty gaining her first experience of employment, and in Osman, the affair she never anticipated.
It was a fluke, an accident of design, like the turns of chance in the Hollywood films she loved. How many times since had she looked up from a stack of inventory and wondered at the improbable direction her life had taken, an artless person such as herself employed at a well-regarded, if disorderly Istiklal Street shop? At no time in her life had she been accorded such recognition, such authority.
“Ah Cenem,” Osman said one afternoon. “If you go to California, you must promise to come back quickly. What’s to become of the shop if you don’t?”
*
When finally she arrives in Los Angeles, it is October 1970, and sitting down to lunch in her sister’s house, she thinks of that day in Osman’s shop. Between her sister and herself, their correspondence had been scattered at best, and in those years at the shop, Cenem was careful to avoid any mention of Osman. Here was the central news of her life, but it was an affair after all, and there was no way to legitimately speak of it.
The journey has been a long one, three days and as many connections. Ylsikoy, Frankfurt, New York. In Istanbul, it is currently nine p.m.—Cenem finds it disorienting to keep her watch on Istanbul time, but Osman has suggested she do so for the first three days, until she acclimates to the change. In Los Angeles, it is now midday, just after eleven, though the fact is difficult to glean in the half-lit room. Overhead, the cut glass arms of a chandelier hold a dozen tiny flame-like bulbs. The french windows are sheathed in heavy drapes and venetian blinds. Her sister’s house, with its ranging, unpeopled rooms is nothing like Cenem imagined. No doors are open to the tepid air, no windows let in the rampant California light. Instead, the house is shuttered, with a capaciousness the sun can’t fill, making the corners shadowed and inexplicable.
On the lace-covered table, a half-dozen delicatessen cartons stand in a line, a spoon placed in each. The egg salad and sliced chicken go largely untouched, and in the adjacent room, just beyond a Moorish arch, there is a small study in which a television is on. The screen is visible from where they sit, and Cenem is impressed by the gleaming dials—a far newer model than her own and apparently less temperamental. The sound and picture are clear, miraculously absent of the tiresome skipping and snow. But the sporadic laughter and music make her uneasy, as though suggesting a companionship more animated and interesting than her own.
Sofia, sitting across the table, delicately spoons egg salad onto her plate. Cenem finds her greatly changed. A widow now nearly fifteen years, Sofia has become an oddly formidable version of their mother, with the same reticent manner and smoke-colored hair. Her sons are scattered across the state, in towns Cenem knows from her Baedecker’s, places that enchant with the romance of their Spanish names—Escondido, Alhambra, San Ramon. Cenem, for her part, has become the kind of woman seen everywhere on the streets of Beyoglu—fastidious, of indeterminate middle age, carrying her pocketbook and string shopping bag and movie magazines.
“You wouldn’t know Beyoglu, Sofia. It’s a different place.”
“And you sold the house?”
“Impossible. The market is terrible.”
Sofia shrugs. “One person can’t live alone in a big house.”
Indeed, Cenem thinks, glancing to grand room just beyond, with its carpets and high back chairs and plump cushions of damask silk—a state of desuetude Cenem knows well from the rooms of the house in Beyoglu. She reaches to the carton of egg salad to right a spoon that has fallen, and as she does, catches sight of her fingernails, badly bitten in the course of the journey. The habit is one carried over from childhood, unbroken despite a lifetime of attempts. In the days before leaving, she planned to give her nails a coat of clear polish, a trick that deters the biting, but in the end kept her fingernails bare, knowing the missing polish would bring an opportunity she’d later regret.
In Istanbul, it is now the hour when the shop closes its doors, when Cenem pulls the curtains in the front windows and Osman counts the till. Most nights after closing they go for coffee at a café, The Cigneta. They always leave the shop together as Cenem long ago ceased to care what might be said about an unmarried woman and her employer.
At this hour, The Cigneta is crowded with people, with students from the university and couples taking in the city and the night air. Osman generally prefers a table near the front where he can drink espresso and read his trade papers while she takes in the view. Along the street, the buildings glow and spotlights illuminate the plane trees to improbable colors of pink and yellow.
“Coffee,” Sofia was saying. “Should we have some?” She rises from her chair, but Cenem stops her.
“Don’t get up. I’ll make it.”
Sofia glances back at the television. “It’s no trouble?”
“No trouble,” Cenem says, noting the American phrase. By ten o’clock, Osman will be at The Cigneta. Likely his day at the shop has not been difficult. He recently hired a replacement, a woman named Amalia. Cenem was the one to train her, who explained how the stock is sorted and the inventory shelved. She tells herself Amalia will not be standing by as Osman locks the door, but she knows better.
*
“So you’ll go in October?” Osman said, not looking up from the column in his paper.
They were at The Cigneta. It was spring, ten-thirty. The evening was mild, and among the tables outside there was not a spare seat to be had. The sidewalk was too small to hold the crowd, and walkers spilled onto the cobbled pavers—merchants like themselves who’ve closed up shop, academics from the university, gray-haired somnambulists hoping the fervor of the street will eventually coax sleep.
At mention of the trip, a frisson shot through Cenem, of eagerness and dread at seeing both Los Angeles and her sister. Planning the journey had been a complicated undertaking requiring numerous visits to the travel agency, a detailed itinerary, the careful allocation of funds, and the detailed listing of her duties to use in training her replacement.
“Everything’s arranged.”
Osman folded his newspaper, and pinched a rind of lemon into the espresso. The oils hung in the air, a biting and decisive cloud that pricked her nose. He sipped his coffee as he always did, fingers delicately gripping the handle. Setting down the cup, he took notice, perhaps for the first time since they’ve arrived, the scene before him on the street.
“I venture she’d hardly recognize the place, if she were to see it again.”
When Sofia was last here, she was still a girl, and Kemal an aspiration of the left. “She still calls it Constantinople.”
“It’s hardly that.”
Cenem agreed. The first-born sister marries and the youngest doesn’t, one leaves for the States and the other stays behind. If the story wasn’t Cenem’s, she’d be gripped by the premise and would want to know more.
Ahead, through the trees, she could make out the marquee of The Bijou Vert. Osman did not care for films. He disliked the proximity of so many others in the dark and saw no point in devoting time to events that were purely fictional. But he alone understood her love of Hollywood film, and the refuge she took in the foreign cinema. There were newer, better theaters in Beyoglu, but Cenem preferred this one, within walking distance of home. The seats were lumpy, but the screen untorn and the projectionist capable.
“There was some strain, some incident in the past. Over marriage, wasn’t it?”
“With my mother and father.”
“And some young man, I recall.”
“He was in my father’s regiment. The lieutenant.” That was what they’d called him, never by his name.
“I’d forgotten that.”
Osman fit the cup carefully into its saucer. “A shame when those things happen.”
She was surprised he mentioned it at all. Talk of anyone’s marriage usually made Osman squeamish. Any discussion had to be tempered so that it failed to suggest the state of matrimony he’d so far managed to evade.
“She wanted to choose for herself,” Cenem ventured. “But in the end—“
“A matter of luck isn’t it, the times we’re born in? Poor girl. You can’t know how people feel.”
Cenem thought the shock was greatest for her mother and father. As her mother told the story, Sofia claimed she could not live without the young lieutenant, and despite the marriage that had been arranged years in advance, the threat turned out to be literal. Soon after, Sofia drank iodine, hoping to end her life rather than marry. There was panic, a doctor called, bread and milk administered. Eight days later, the wedding went forward, the blisters in Sofia’s stomach having sufficiently healed, and the young lieutenant dispatched to an administrative post in Ankara.
Across the green, the doors to the theater opened and the moviegoers emerged. Cenem knew well that disorientation, moving from the blackness of the theater to the noise and light of the street. She knew too, the sadness that came with returning to the world and the facts beyond the gilded doors. Long after she has left The Bijou Vert, the frames run fervently in her brain, replaying the surprise or sadness of the ending.