Gone, Where to?

Some sixty years later, I couldn’t find my street on the Harbiye map. Kept flipping web pages, searching and searching. I know buildings get torn down, streets change names, for better or for worse. I know whole areas undergo urban renewal, and in some cases urban decadence, but this! I certainly wasn’t ready for this. No sign of Ölçek Sokak, or Ölçek Street, in the Harbiye neighborhood of Istanbul. I felt cheated out of something. Why didn’t anyone report the news to me? I couldn’t travel back anywhere anymore, certainly not to what used to be my street. Even my imagination was under assault, let alone bygone reality tentatively surging up and down memory lane.

So more web page flipping, more searching. Until I spotted the picture of my old Armenian school, Anarad Hığutyun. Indeed, it was almost the same frontal snapshot I had taken on my last trip to Istanbul in 2009. Same façade, door, windows. I could almost see myself behind that door, those windows, between 1960 and 1963 which enclosed my one and only preschool year plus two elementary years (minus one term). But the caption below the photograph said Papa Roncalli Sokak, Pope Roncalli Street. How come? Who was that Pope Roncalli? Did he ever converse with the catholic nuns of Anarad Hığutyun, greet an ancestor of mine who happened to pass by, purchase half a pound of goat cheese at the grocer’s round the corner ? Did he pray for the Armenian people be they Evangelical, Catholic, Apostolic, non-affiliated or atheist? Did he vow to educate Armenian girls, all girls around the world, be they rich or destitute ?

A web page provided scant information on the history of the Anarad Hığutyun school. It opened on a Pangaltı street in 1903. But it didn’t say where exactly in Pangaltı. The Catholic school aimed to instruct Armenian girls of poor background. So, not all of the Ottoman Armenian population was wealthy, as the myth goes. Educating girls – a noble and essential task to this day and most likely through tomorrows. The school moved to Ölçek Sokak in 1915. But which month of 1915? It didn’t say. By the time I visited the Turkish lady who had been residing on Ölçek Sokak all her life (or so it seemed to me) and whose severely enfeebled yet still graceful mother had been a good neighbor to my paternal grand-mother (she long gone, dead and buried in Marseilles), the school had closed down in 2004. “All of you gone, the school had to close down,” said the Turkish neighbor lady. After taking leave of my hosts, I loitered in front of that closed door for a while. No one stepped outside. Not a soul stirred behind the curtains. No need to ring the bell. Better move on, go one’s way, as in the French expression passer son chemin.

Where had all the children gone? The little Armenian boys of co-ed preschool? The very young Armenian girls of early 1960s Istanbul? I couldn’t remember any names although I remembered the sound of names, Nvart, Zvart, Verjin, Vartuhi. Where had all the children gone? I used to not like the heavy atmosphere of the place with its strict routine. I even hated nap time in kindergarten. It all felt like a series of required drills. No questioning allowed. No humor whatsoever. Life was a tragedy from the start, better get used to it.

After my last trip to Istanbul, I pulled out the only picture I had retained from my school days there. A group picture of girls and boys with one teacher (not a nun) in the middle of the last row. Uniforms were not black but white in preschool. In the foreground seven girls seated on a small oriental rug laid upon the stone tiles of the yard. Six of the students are huddled together, the one on the left, dainty, precautious, untrusting, has decided to sit on the cold stone. Eleven others, including three boys symmetrically distributed to the edges and the center, are seated on stools in the second row. Fourteen more are standing behind, with one boy to the left, one to the right. The last girl in this third row, shorter in height, seems puzzled as if she belonged to the group age of the second row. The thirteen pupils in the background were told to step on stools and surround the teacher. I stand in the fourth row, a silk seagull of a ribbon atop my skull.

No memories to cherish or to shake off. No joy, no bitterness. The 1960 or 1961 photograph was as void and inanimate as the Anarad Hığutyun school building of 2009. A Throwback Thursday token, at best. The kind that would draw attention on social media and score “likes”. Ten, twenty, fifty “likes”? What for? For decades gone by and never to be retrieved ? For a schoolyard turned perhaps into a private patio? For time and place estranged? A gap was gashed between my older self and this picture, a gap as abyssal as between my language-wise self and the credit names scrolling down at the end of, let’s say a Nuri Bilge Ceylan movie (since he’s a regular at the Cannes Film Festival). Unacquainted, unschooled I had become. Where are all the Ayşes and Hamdis, the Fatmas and Fikrets gone?