My Father’s Books

The Dream of the Books

170 The Dream of the Books It is not pos­ sible, it will never be pos­ sible, for a sin­ gle war to solve the prob­ lems of an era. No mat­ ter how big it is, no mat­ ter how just for some and un­ just for oth­ ers, war will im­ pose new bor­ ders. What if these bor­ ders sever the souls of peo­ ple, fam­ i­ lies, gar­ dens, ­ dreams, time, the­ people’s time? What is left for these peo­ ple who are con­ demned to the hell ­ within the bor­ ders of Bab­ y­ lon other than to ac­ cus­ tom them­ selves­ calmly to their des­ tiny? To build a new home in Babel . . . When my ­ father re­ turned from Con­ stan­ tin­ o­ ple, he re­ mained for­ ever en­ tan­ gled in the Bal­ kan bor­ der­ lines. With great luck he ­ stayed alive and just man­ aged to get his fam­ ily ­ across sev­ eral bor­ ders, but deep ­ within him the last flick­ er­ ing of his Con­ stan­ tin­ o­ ple ­ nights was ex­ tin­ guished. Later, after Sta­ lin­ ism ended, some­ where ­ around the 1960s, when the bor­ ders were at last ­ opened and it was pos­ sible once again to ­ travel to Con­ stan­ tin­ o­ ple, we chil­ dren ­ thought that my ­ father would fi­ nally go there; he would get to go to Con­ stan­ tin­ o­ ple be­ fore his death and so com­ plete the great dream he had ­ dreamed in frag­ ments ­ through those ter­ rible years in the Bal­ kans spent res­ cu­ ing his fam­ ily. We chil­ dren felt a rush of hap­ pi­ ness that our ­ father’s ­ travel to Con­ stan­ tin­ o­ ple could be re­ newed. To us, op­ pressed by the ­ evenly dis­ trib­ uted pov­ erty of the So­ cial­ ist years, Con­ stan­ tin­ o­ ple now ap­ peared as a pos­ sible es­ cape. After ­ thirty years of si­ lence the first news ar­ rived from rel­ a­ tives there. Among the first to head off to Con­ stan­ tin­ o­ ple were the ac­ com­ plished trad­ ers and—need I even say it—the So­ cial­ ist smug­ glers. The first let­ ters ­ started to ar­ rive, the first calls, but my ­ father never re­ vealed their se­ cret to us. 171 When reg­ u­ lar bus ser­ vice was es­ tab­ lished ­ between our city and Con­ stan­ tin­ o­ ple, we be­ came ever more im­ pa­ tient to pick the day to send our ­ father on his sec­ ond voy­ age there, to the city of his youth, while his body still sup­ ported him. My ­ father ­ avoided dis­ cus­ sions about his pos­ sible trip to Con­ stan­ tin­ o­ ple. We had known be­ fore that he did not like to talk about the years of his youth in Con­ stan­ tin­ o­ ple. He acted as if he had never even been there. But we under­ stood when, in the mid­ dle of his Bal­ kan ­ nights, in the eye of the radio that he had ­ brought from Con­ stan­ tin­ o­ ple and­ dragged along on all our Bal­ kan re­ set­ tle­ ments as if it were an equal mem­ ber of the fam­ ily, he ­ searched for a cer­ tain Con­ stan­ tin­ o­ ple radio sta­ tion to find that en­ chant­ ing in­ stru­ men­ tal and vocal music, that East­ ern spir­ i­ tu­ al­ ity, which, it ­ seemed, drew him to dis­ tant ­ places. We knew that some­ thing pow­ er­ ful had hap­ pened to him in his youth in Con­ stan­ tin­ o­ ple, some­ thing that ­ marked him for his whole life. It was as if he had sworn never to re­ turn to that city again. One day, my old­ est ­ brother, hav­ ing ­ waited a long time for my ­ father to re­ veal to us the se­ cret of his life in Con­ stan­ tin­ o­ ple, asked him im­ pa­ tiently, “So, Dad, the coun­ try has ­ opened up. Every­ one is travel­ ing to Con­ stan­ tin­ o­ ple. How come you ­ aren’t going to see your peo­ ple now while you still can, now that we are al­ ready on our own two feet?” Our ­ father was and was not sur­ prised by this ques...