Black Milk Part 4

I find myself nodding heartily, though the more she speaks, the more lost I am becoming.

"Unfortunately too many lives are crushed in a monotonous routine. Such a pity! One must actually aim to be special. We have to become immortal while we are still alive. You have to write better novels and develop your skill. 'You need to work continually day and night, to read ceaselessly, to study, to exercise your will. . . . Each hour is precious.'"

"Was that Chekhov again?" I ask suspiciously.

"It was Anton Pavlovich Chekhov," she says with a frown, and to hammer home the point, she repeats his name in Russian. "HTOH ."

"Right." I sigh.

"Look, I made a calculation: If you write a new novel every year for the next ten years, give a lecture every month, attend all the major literary festivals in Europe and tour the world, then in eight years and two months you'll have reached new heights in your career."

"Oh, give me a break, will you?" I say, exasperated. "Do you think literature is a horse race? Do you think I am a machine?"

"What is wrong with that?" she says nonchalantly. "Better to be a machine than a vegetable! Instead of living like a sprig of parsley, pa.s.sionless and lifeless, better to live with the dash and zest of a working machine."

"And what about motherhood?"

"Motherhood . . . motherhood . . ." she says, glowering, as if the word has left a bad taste in her mouth. "Better leave motherhood to women who are born to be mothers. We both know you are not like that. Motherhood would upset all of my future plans. Promise me. Say you won't do it!"

I look into the horizon, longing to be somewhere else. In the ensuing silence Miss Ambitious Chekhovian slowly gets up, walks to her bag and fishes out a piece of paper.

"What is this?" I ask when she holds it out to me.

"It is an address," says Miss Ambitious Chekhovian. "The address of an excellent gynecologist. Guess what! I already got you an appointment. The doctor is expecting you at six-thirty on Tuesday."

"But, why?"

Miss Ambitious Chekhovian's eyes light up as her voice gets an eerie softness: "Because we want to solve this problem once and for all. This operation will do away with all of the existential questions that have been messing with your mind. I've decided to have you sterilized."

"What am I, a stray cat!?" I say, flus.h.i.+ng scarlet with rage.

Dissatisfied, she shrugs and turns around. "It is up to you."

I know I should mind my temper but I can't. Still grumbling, I leave her to her veterinary campaign and head up north.

There, behind an ornamented iron door, in a city as bustling with ideas as New York, lives Miss Highbrowed Cynic. Her windows are covered with burgundy velvet curtains and flimsy cobwebs, her walls with posters of Che Guevara and Marlon Brando.

She wears slovenly hippie dresses that reach the floor and mirror-threaded Indian vests. She wraps bright foulards around her neck and wears bangle bracelets of every color up to her elbows. When she feels like it, she goes to get a tattoo or another piercing. Depending on the day, she either leaves her shoulder-length hair loose or puts it up in a haphazard bun. She does raja yoga and advanced Reiki. All the acupuncture she's received has yet to help her quit smoking. If she isn't smoking a cigarette or a cigarillo, she chews tobacco.

Her handbags are cluttered sacks, where she fits in several books, notebooks and all sorts of knickknacks. She usually doesn't wear makeup, not because she is against it but because when she puts a mascara or lipstick in her handbag, she can never find it again.

Miss Highbrowed Cynic is following an alternative diet nowadays. She has a plate of organic spinach, organic zucchini and some kind of mixed vegetables with saffron in front of her. She is a staunch vegetarian on the verge of turning vegan. It has been years since she last ate meat. Or chicken. Or fish. She claims that when we consume an animal, we also consume their fear of death. Apparently that is the reason we get sick. Instead, we are meant to eat peaceful leafy greens, such as spinach, lettuce, kale, arugula . . .

"h.e.l.lo, Miss Highbrowed Cynic," I say.

"Peace, Sister," she says, waving her hand nonchalantly.

"I need to pick your brain on an important matter," I say.

"Well, you came to the right place. I am brains."

"Okay, what is your opinion about motherhood?"

"What is the use of asking rhetorical questions when it is a well-known fact that everyone hears only what they want to hear," she says. "Wittgenstein wrote about the limits of language for a reason. You ought to read the Tractatus."

"I don't have time to read the Tractatus," I say. "Ms. Agaoglu is still in the living room waiting for an answer. You've got to help me now."

"Well, then, I urge you to think about the word envy."

"Come again?"

"Envy is not a simple emotion, mind you, but a deep philosophical dilemma. It is so important, in fact, that it shapes world history. Jean-Paul Sartre said all sorts of racism and xenophobia stem from envy."

"I am afraid I don't get a word of what you are saying. Could you please speak more plainly?"

"All right, let me put it in simple terms: The gra.s.s is always greener on the other side."

"Which means?"

"It means if you have a baby, you will always be envious of women who don't have children and focus fully on their careers. If you choose to focus on your career, however, you will always envy women who have kids. Whichever path you choose, your mind will be obsessed with the option you have discarded."

"Is there no way out of this dilemma?" I ask.

She shakes her head desolately. "Envy lies at the root of our existential angst. Look at the history of mankind, all the wars and destruction. Do you know what they said when World War I broke out? The war that will end all wars! Of course that is not what happened. The wars didn't end because there is no equality and no justice. Instead we have an imbalance of power and income, ethnic and religious clashes. . . . All of this is bound to generate new conflicts."

I take a long, deep breath. "You are making me depressed."

"You ought to be depressed," she says, wagging a finger in my face. "To live means to be saddled with melancholy. It is no coincidence that Paul Klee painted the Angel of History so lonely and hopeless. Remember the look on the face of Angelus Novus. I highly recommend that you read Walter Benjamin on . . ."

"You are making me soooo depressed," I interject.

She stares at me as if seeing me for the first time. "Oh, I see. In the age of Internet and multimedia, no one has the time or patience for in-depth knowledge anymore. All right, I will cut to the chase."

"Please."

"My point is, whichever woman you will grow into, you will wish to be the Other. According to the great French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, the essence of ethics is the point where you come face-to-face with the Other. Of course, from a phenomenological stance, we could speak of the 'other' inside the 'I.'"

"Ugh, hm!" I say.

"Read Heidegger to see how a human being, any human being, cannot be taken into account unless seen as an existent among the things surrounding him, the key to all existence being Dasein, which is being-in-the-world." She widens her dark green eyes at me. "Therefore, my answer to your ba.n.a.l question is as follows: It doesn't really matter."

"What do you mean?" I say, trying to keep frustration from my voice.

"Whether you don't have children or you have half a dozen of them, it is all the same," she says with customary a.s.surance. "In the end, it all boils down to the envy of the Other, and to deep existential dissatisfaction. Humans do not know how to be satisfied. Like Cioran said, we are all sentenced to fall inside ourselves and be miserable."

A freezing wind blows in through an open window. The candle in my hand flickers sadly and I s.h.i.+ver. Miss Highbrowed Cynic's voice, stiff with relish and conviction, scratches my ears. I begin to walk away from her.

"Hey, where are you going? Come back, I haven't finished yet."

"You'll never be finished," I say. "Bye now."

It is getting late and talking to Miss Highbrowed Cynic has demoralized me so profoundly I cannot stand to hear another word on this subject. I clamber up the stairs of the Land of Me, two at a time, panting heavily, and fall back into Ms. Agaoglu's bathroom. I make a move to wash my face but the running water is too hot and adjusting the temperature requires an energy I am not sure I have now. So I turn off the faucet and, doing my best to look calm and composed, return to the living room.

Everything is the way I left it. The paintings on the walls, the books on the shelves, the porcelain teacups on the table, the cookies on the plates, the ticking of the clock, are the same and the house preserves the same solemn silence. Ms. Agaoglu is tranquilly waiting in her seat. The question she asked me a while ago still hangs in the air between us. But I don't have an answer. Not yet.

"Umm . . . thank you so much for your hospitality," I say. "But I should really get going."

"Well, it was nice talking to you," she says. "Woman to woman, writer to writer."

When I step out into the street I catch sight of the two Gypsy women sitting in the same spot. Judging by the flushed looks on their faces, they are excitedly talking about something, but upon noticing me, they go quiet.

"Hey, you," one of them says. "Why do you look so down in the dumps?"

"Probably because I am down there," I say.

The woman laughs. "Come, give me your palm and I'll tell you the way out."

"Forget about telling my fortune," I say. "What I need is a cigarette. Let's have a smoke together instead."

It is as if I've suggested robbing a bank. They get serious and become suspicious all of a sudden, eyeing me distrustfully. I ignore their gaze, sit down on the sidewalk and take out a pack of cigarettes from my bag.

That's when a smile etches along the lips of the Gypsy who offered to read my fortune only moments ago. She slides over to me. A few seconds later the other one joins us.

As darkness falls, only paces from Ms. Agaoglu's living room, the Gypsy flower sellers and I are seated cross-legged on a sidewalk, puffing away. Above us a wispy cloud of smoke lingers lazily. For a moment, the world feels sweet and peaceful, as if there were nothing to worry about, no questions gnawing at my mind.

Moon Woman In 1862, Leo Tolstoy married a woman sixteen years his junior: Sophia Andreevna Bers. Although the marriage was to become known as one of the unhappiest in literary history, there may have been much love and pa.s.sion between them-at least in the early years. There was a time when they laughed together, he like a wild horse galloping at full speed, she like a mare cantering across the paddock, timid but excited. Thirteen children came of this union (nineteen, according to some). Five of them died during childhood. Sophia raised the remaining eight (or fourteen). She spent a large portion of her life as a young woman either pregnant or breast-feeding.

She was like the moon in its phases, glowing against the starry skies. Her body changed every minute of the day, every week, and every month, filling out, rounding up to fullness, and then slimming down only to fill out again. Sophia was a moon woman.

While Tolstoy was in his room, writing by the light of an oil lamp, Sonya-the Russian diminutive for Sophia-distracted the children lest they disturb their father. Her diaries bear witness to her dedication. When Tolstoy asked Sophia not to nag him for not writing, she was so surprised she wrote down in her diary, "But how can I nag? What right do I have?" Night after night, year after year, she worked hard to make the process of writing easier for him. And in the hours that were not consumed by her kids, she acted as her husband's secretary. Not only did she keep the notes for War and Peace, she rewrote the entire ma.n.u.script seven times over. Once when she suffered a miscarriage and fell gravely ill, she was worried that because of her illness he would not be able to write. She inspired, indulged and a.s.sisted him-a fact that is hard to remember when one sees the depth of the hatred that cropped up between them later in life.

Then he wrote the marvelous Anna Karenina-the novel that begins with one of the most quoted lines in world literature: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." One question literary historians and biographers are fond of bringing up is to what extent Tolstoy's real life influenced the subject matter of the novel. How many of Tolstoy's own fears, with regard to his wife and his marriage, found their way into Anna Karenina? Perhaps the famous writer, then forty-four, steered his story into the stormy waters of adultery as a warning to Sophia, who was then only twenty-eight. Perhaps by writing about the disastrous consequences that a high-society lady could suffer through infidelity, he was simply cautioning his wife.

As if a married woman's debauchery isn't sinful enough, when lovers live not in the high mountains in isolation but in the heart of the civilized world, it is a sin far worse. The first time Alexey Alexandrovitch has a serious talk with his wife, he makes this very clear: "I want to warn you that through thoughtlessness and lack of caution you may cause yourself to be talked about in society." Things get out of hand not when a woman has feelings for a man other than her husband but when the knowledge of this becomes public.

It is also probable that through his novel, Tolstoy wasn't only sending his wife a message but was also teaching his daughters of varying ages a lesson in morality. Strangely enough, the novel ended up having more impact on him than on his wife or daughters. He went through a moral torment, the first of many, which would end up paving the way for a very different sort of existential crisis-one that would strike at the very essence of his marriage.

No matter how we interpret the events that followed, this much is true: Sophia never saw Anna as a role model, positive or negative. The fictional character who wore dark lilac, who wished to be like a happy heroine in an English novel, who worked on a children's book and who smoked opium-although similar in some ways to Sophia-was clearly not her. Despite the concerns her husband harbored, she never abandoned him or loved another man. On the contrary, she remained attached-perhaps too attached-to her husband and to her family, until it drove her over the edge. Every year a new baby came, and with every child Sophia turned a bit more irritable and their marriage took another blow.

A day would not pa.s.s without an argument erupting within the house, the husband's and wife's energies drained by petty squabbles no bigger than a speck of dust. In this way, the Tolstoys waded through the thick fog of marriage for several more years. s.e.xuality was still a way of reconnecting, but when that, too, was gone-more for him than for her-and the fog began to dissolve, Tolstoy couldn't bear to see what it had been hiding all that time.

When Tolstoy peered into the soul of his wife, he saw youth, desire and ambition, and was displeased with what he found. When Sophia peered into the soul of her husband, she saw self-centeredness mixed with the seeds of altruism, and never sensed how much this would affect their lives in the future. He stared at her and wondered how she, as comfortable and well brought up as she was, could still have worldly aspirations. She stared at him and wondered how he, as pampered and respected as he was, could love anything, be it his writing or G.o.d, more than he loved her.

Like Dr. Frankenstein, who struggled to rid himself of the creature he had designed and crafted, Tolstoy made an unhappy, argumentative wife out of the young girl he had married years earlier.

For a while he tried to put up with her, but his patience rapidly ran out. In a letter written to his daughter Alexandra Lvovna, he complained of Sophia's "perpetual spying, eavesdropping, incessant complaining, ordering him about, as her fancy takes her. . . ." In the same breath, he said he wanted freedom from her. He suddenly, abrasively and irreversibly distanced himself from his wife and from everything that was a.s.sociated with her.

Then one day, he simply took off.

That afternoon, for the first time in a long while, he felt freedom by his side, not as an abstract concept or an idea to defend, but as a presence, so close, solid and tangible. He walked. He skipped and jumped. At the top of his voice, he sang songs that no one had heard before. The peasants working in the nearby fields solemnly watched the most respected novelist in Russia doing one crazy thing after another, and they spoke about it to no one. As if in return for their silent support, that same evening, Tolstoy decided to give away his possessions to the poor. The man who came from an aristocratic background, who had been sheltered all his life, was now determined to shed all the privileges of his station.

When Sophia, the matriarch, heard about this, she went berserk. Only a fool would squander his wealth like that, she was certain-only a fool with no wife or children to care for. Before long, and much to her chagrin, Tolstoy publicly declared that he had wiped his hands clean of the material world. He gave away all of his money, all of his land. Abandoning the banquets he was so fond of, he swore off eating meat, hunting and drinking, and put himself to work like a village craftsman.

Sophia watched his transformation in absolute horror. The n.o.bleman she married, the writer she adored and the husband for whom she bore children was gone, replaced by a badly dressed, flea-ridden peasant. It was an insult that drove straight into her heart.

She called Tolstoy's new habits "the Dark Ones," as if speaking of a fatal illness, like a plague that had tainted their household. Her lips chapped from biting them, her mouth contorted in unhappiness and her face that of a woman older than her age, she suffered one nervous breakdown after another. One day her son Lev asked Sophia if she was happy. It took her a while to answer a question as simple and challenging as this. Finally she said yes, she was happy. Her son asked, "So why do you look like a martyress?"

The love between husband and wife, as strong as it might once have been, could not accommodate the woman and man they had grown into, generating mutual rage and resentment, like a wound bleeding inwardly.

Finally, in the fall of 1910, a few months after secretly taking his wife out of his will, and giving the publis.h.i.+ng rights of his novels to his editor, Tolstoy fell sick with pneumonia. Fading in and out of consciousness, the way he had faded in and out of his wife's life for decades, he died in a train station where he had fled to after yet another argument at home. It is symbolic that the writer, who had started his literary walk by claiming that true happiness lies within family life, ended his life by walking away from his family, away from her.

For a long time Sophia was seen as solely a mother and wife. Her great contribution to Tolstoy's literary legacy was either ignored or belittled. It is only recently that we are beginning to see her in a different light-as a diarist, intellectual and businesswoman-and can appreciate her as a talented, selfless woman with many abilities and unrealized dreams.

PART TWO.

Winds of Change.

What the Fishermen Know.

Two months later, I am walking by the seaside at six o'clock in the morning on a Sunday. I am an early riser, not because I don't like sleep-which I don't, really-but because waking up after the sun comes out leaves me feeling slightly irritated, as if the whole world has been whooping it up, and I am catching only the end of the party.

So here I am, up and out for a walk. The only other life forms awake at this hour are the seagulls, the street cats and Istanbul's amateur fishermen. Music on my iPod (Amy Winehouse), popcorn in my pockets (suffice it to say, I believe that in a better world, popcorn would make it onto the breakfast menu), I walk briskly, mulling over the life of Sophia Tolstoy.

There is a crystalline quality to the air, and the sky hangs indigo above me, furrowed by rose-flushed clouds that move toward the hills far ahead. Istanbul looks rejuvenated and clean, like a young bride fresh out of the hamam. One can almost imagine that this is not the same city that drives its inhabitants crazy day after day. Now it looks picturesque and alluring, a city dipped in honey. I suspect Istanbul is at its prettiest when we Istanbulites aren't around-yet another reason to wake up early.

Along the coastline toward Bebek there are twenty to thirty fishermen-from teenage boys to grandfathers with canes-strung along in a perfect line, facing the sea. Like prayer beads on a thread, they stand side by side with their plastic buckets and jars of wriggling worms, their eyes fixed somewhere on the horizon and their fingers clutched around fis.h.i.+ng rods. They do not talk or joke around. They simply, patiently wait for the fish to come and take the bait.

Later in the hour, the sun is rising, but I notice it has company. The moon is still there-a day or two shy of fullness. My eyes are riveted on the sky. Doesn't the moon know it is in the wrong place at the wrong time? As I watch its faint aura, I think about Sophia again.

"If Sophia had been a novelist, would Leo Tolstoy have a.s.sisted her in the same way she a.s.sisted him?" I wonder. "Would he have made copies of his wife's ma.n.u.scripts over and over again? Would he have taken the children out for a walk, and met their every need, so that his wife could have more hours of peace and quiet to concentrate on her writing?"

Laden with these questions, I walk toward the park in the midst of the neighborhood. The playground, which is packed with mothers, children and babies during the day, is empty now. I sit on a bench, watching a few pigeons waddle around, poking at the crumbs of bread stuck in the crevices.

Suddenly, a scream pierces the air, pulling me out of my reverie. I rise to my feet, my heart pounding. "Who's there?"

In lieu of an answer comes another scream, shrill and loud, followed by a bang, like something being dropped, or someone being slapped. The sounds are coming from behind the mulberry bush a few feet ahead. More curious than cautious, I tread in that direction.

"Heeelp!"

I know this female voice from somewhere, but where, I cannot tell.