Christopher Linforth

Genealogia

My other self rarely asks questions about me. He exists on a parallel plane, superior in his mind, concerned with the strange lives of ancestors. We share a lineage to a now-dead family in Beyoğlu. Snapshots captured three smudged figures in front of a grand townhouse in Istanbul. Constantinople then, he corrects. For I am always wrong, not worth talking to, the occupant of a dull, tarnished mind. Our great-grandfather, he gushes, was Levantine. A Frenchman who married an Italian in the Church of St. Anthony of Padua. They joined a lively community in the cafés and theaters and bookstores. They listened to the Latin mother tongue at daily Mass and rebetiko and jazz and flamenco at night. “Alafranga,” the Turks would mutter in the tea houses. Our great-grandfather told his wife to ignore the locals. “They’re not like us,” he said. “Our culture is centuries ahead.” She looked away, said nothing. In time they had a child, Aude, a sprightly girl with dark hair and a bright face. They filled their townhouse with red tulips and soft cushions and Kewpie dolls. French and Italian and Greek and Ladino voices rattled through the house. Russian dissidents and poets and dancers and concert musicians and shipping brokers visited the family. Our great-grandfather hosted everyone, served them strong coffee and mille-feuilles. His wife sat on her favorite velvet méridienne and entertained guests with stories of her childhood in a village in Lombardy. At fifteen, her parents had betrothed her to a cattle farmer a valley over. She despised the old man, his tan bony face and thinning gray hair, and she left Piero with a small suitcase and just a few lira. She went south to Rome and lived near Via dei Giubbonari, working as a laundress. At night, she read the poetry of Leopardi and Dante, and would sleep only after incanting one of Petrarca’s love sonnets. She drank red wine, had several paramours, and at least two abortions. She became tired of Rome, the way men were. She booked passage aboard a ship to Constantinople. The ocean liner sailed across the Mediterranean, circling the boot of Italy and hugging the coast of Greece, and up through the Aegean Sea to Constantinople. She stayed in a rough guesthouse near the port, and she walked the city each day, gravitating toward the cosmopolitan streets of Beyoğlu. Before long, our great-grandfather met her at one of the neighborhood’s bohemian cafés. “René,” he said, explaining who he was in his pidgin Italian. “My father was born in Avignon and my mother in Vienna.” She set down her glass of limoncello and studied him. “Marie,” she replied. “I didn’t know my parents. I grew up in a religious orphanage.” They talked that night about his work as an architect and then Italian poetry and the Russian Revolution. She skirted around her past life in Rome, her family back in Piero, the old man claiming her as his future wife. René and Marie drank cognac back at the townhouse. They had quick, sweaty sex on his velvet méridienne. They married a few months later. No photographs survive of the ceremony or their first years together. Only the later snapshots of the townhouse and the three blurred figures still exist. Family legend contends Marie took on a lover in Sultanahmet, a young Turkish poet who wrote about Marie and the dying of the Ottoman Empire. “You flourish like a red tulip in the gardens of Topkapi,” he wrote, “while the Sultan broods inside the palace.” They carried on their affair in secret. He sent her poems written in Turkish Arabic script, and she spent her days translating his words, sometimes quoting lines at dinner or singing verses as she strolled through the public gardens. In bed, they discussed moving to Ankara and Paris, perhaps even to New York. “I can’t leave Aude,” Marie would always remind him. Close friends knew of the relationship, but René never brought it up. He disappeared into his design studio, shouting now and again at his assistants. Then he started sleeping in his studio. Marie moved to Sultanahmet to live with her young lover. Sometimes she came to see her daughter, bringing her a little box of rosewater lokum or a covered bowl of sütlaç. On her last visit, an army truck hit Marie on Grand Rue de Péra. She lay on the road unmoving, her face white, her neck cranked unnaturally back. Aude ran to her, touched her hand, asked the gathering soldiers to help. They looked on and said there was no helping her. A Levantine newspaper later reported that she had been buried at St. Anthony’s. After the service, René blamed the war of independence and the new government. “Now they want our house,” he said. “We’ll have nothing left. How can I care for my daughter?” He did not know what it meant to be a Turk, what it would take to stay. It’s how you ended up here, more than a thousand miles away. A mind adrift, sopped on sahlab and stories about the old country. It’s how you lost your way.

Christopher Linforth is a UK/US writer with roots in the Levantine of Constantinople. His latest book is The Distortions (Orison Books, 2022).