The Black Book (12 page)
Authors: Orhan Pamuk
It was as if the ghost of a third person bonded the two men in the room to the author of the book with the crow on the cover, to the imaginative power of the sad, insignificant, isolated life that was spent going back and forth between a house in a provincial town and the small hardware store he inherited from his father. Galip felt like saying: “There is only one story told in all that’s been written, in all those letters, all the words, all the hopes of salvation and the recollections of torture and disgrace, penned with the joy and sorrow of all those hopes and the recollections, a single story.” It was as if Saim had captured the story somewhere in his collection of white papers, periodicals, and newsprint which he’d pulled together with the patience of a fisherman who’s thrown his net into the ocean for years. And he knew he got it too. But besides being unable to seize the naked story hidden in all the material that he’d stacked up and put into order, he’d lost the word that would unlock it.
When they came across Mehmet Yilmaz’s name in a periodical published four years ago, Galip began saying that it was just a coincidence and that he ought to go home, but Saim stopped him declaring that nothing was coincidental in his periodicals—he spoke of them as “my periodicals” now. Making a superhuman effort for the next two hours, leaping from one periodical into another, rolling his eyes like projectors, Galip discovered Mehmet Yilmaz had been converted to Ahmet Yilmaz; in a periodical which had a well on the cover and which roiled with chickens and peasants, Ahmet Yilmaz had now turned into a Mete Çakmaz; it was not too difficult for Saim to put together that Metin Çakmaz and Ferit Çakmaz were also the same individual; in the meantime, the pen name had given up on theoretical articles and gone for writing lyrics for songs that are sung accompanied by stringed instruments and cigarette smoke at memorials held in wedding halls. But he hadn’t stayed with that too long, either; for a while, he’d turned into a pen name which was convinced that everybody except itself was part of the police, then into an ambitious and highstrung math-oriented economist who deciphered the perversities of British academicians. But he wasn’t someone who could long tolerate dark and dire clichés. Saim found his hero in an issue of another periodical collection for which he’d tiptoed into the bedroom, published some three years ago, as if he’d planted him there himself: the guy’s name was now Ali Celan, who expounded on the details of how life would be lived in a classless society in a beautiful future: cobbled streets would remain cobbled and not covered under asphalt; detective novels which were a waste of time would be banned as well as mystifying newspaper columns; the habit of having barbers come home to give haircuts would be broken. And when Galip read that the education of children, in order to prevent them from getting brainwashed by their parents’ stupid prejudices, would be delegated to their grandparents who lived upstairs, he had no doubt left as to the identity of the pen name, and he came to the painful realization that Rüya had shared her childhood recollections with her ex-husband. Surprisingly enough, it was announced in the next issue that the same pen name belonged to a professor of mathematics who was a member of the Academy of Albanian Studies. There, below the professor’s life story, not hidden under some assumed moniker, stood Rüya’s ex-husband’s real name, silent and motionless like a bewildered bug caught under the kitchen light turned on suddenly.
“Nothing can be as astounding as life,” Saim said exultantly, “except writing.”
He tiptoed into the bedroom once more and came out with two cardboard Sana margarine cases piled up with periodicals. “These are the periodicals of a splinter group that has some connection to Albania. I’m going to relate to you a strange mystery I’ve managed to solve only because I’ve devoted to it so many years of my life. I have a feeling it’s related to the object you’re looking for.”
He brewed a fresh pot of tea, took some periodicals out of the boxes and some books off the shelves that he deemed necessary for the telling of his story, and placed them on the table.
“It was six years ago,” he began, “a Saturday afternoon. I was looking through the magazines put out by fellow travelers of the Albanian Labor Party and its leader Enver Hoxha (and there were three publications back then which were all sworn enemies of each other); as I was leafing through the last issue of one called
The Labor of the People
to see if there was anything of interest, my eye caught a photograph and an article: it was about a ceremony in honor of new recruits inducted into the faction. What caught my attention was not the disclosure that the recruits were inducted into a Marxist organization with songs and poems in a country where all Communist activity is illegal, no; I knew that, in spite of the danger, all the small leftist splinter groups published similar articles in each issue in order to stay alive, to make it known that their numbers were growing. What did catch my attention was the caption that mentioned pointedly the ‘twelve’ columns in the black-and-white photo which showed a crowd smoking passionately as if it were performing a sacred duty, the posters of Enver Hoxha and Mao, and the reciters of poetry. Even more strange, the assumed names of the new recruits mentioned in the interview were always chosen from the names of the Alawite order, names like Hasan, Hüseyin, Ali and, as I was to discover later, the names of the Bektaşi sheiks, spiritual leaders. Had I not known that Bektaşi Sufi orders had been big in Albania at one time, perhaps I would never have suspected anything about this incredible mystery, but I went at the events and the articles hammer and tongs. For four whole years I read books constantly on the Bektaşi order, the Janissary army, Hurufism, and Albanian Communism, and I unraveled a hundred-and-fifty-year-old conspiracy.”
“You know all this anyway,” Saim said but went on to recite the Bektaşi history of seven hundred years, beginning with Hacı Bektaş Veli. He gave an account of how the order had Alawite, Sufi, and shamanistic origins, how it was related to the periods of inception and rise of the Ottoman Empire and the tradition of revolution and rebellion in the Janissary army, the center of which was rooted in the Bektaşi order. If you considered, after all, that each Janissary soldier was a Bektaşi, then you saw instantly its mystery stamped on the history of Istanbul. The first time the Bektaşis got the boot out of Istanbul, it was due to the Janissaries: while the barracks got blitzed in 1826 under the orders of Mahmut the Second, seeing how the rebellious army was unwilling to accept his program of Westernization, the tekkes which maintained the spiritual health of the Janissaries were shut down and the Bektaşi dervishes kicked out of town.
Twenty years after going underground, the Bektaşis returned to Istanbul, but this time under the guise of the Nakşbendi order. Until Atatürk banned all the activities of the orders seventy years later, the Bektaşis presented themselves to the world as Nakşis, but they lived among themselves as Bektaşis, burying their secrets even deeper.
Galip studied an engraving from an English travel book that represented a Bektaşi ritual which probably reflected the fantasy in the mind of the artist-traveler rather than reality. He counted the
twelve
columns in the engraving one by one.
“The third time the Bektaşis manifested themselves,” Saim said, “it was fifty years after the Republic, not under the Nakşbendi order this time but wearing a Marxist-Leninist guise…” Following a silence, he gave an excited recital, producing by way of illustration articles, photos, engravings he’d cut out of journals, books, brochures. All that was performed, written, and experienced in the Bektaşi order corresponded exactly to all that went on in the political factions: the rituals of initiation; the periods of severe trials and self-denial before the initiation; the pain endured by the youthful aspirants during these periods; the veneration for the fallen, the sainted, and the dead among the order’s or the faction’s past members, and the rites of paying homage to them; the sacred meaning assigned to the word “road”; the repetition of words and expressions for the sake of the spirit of oneness and community; the litanies; the fact that adepts who travel the same road recognize each other by their beards, mustaches, even the expressions in their eyes; the meter and the rhyme scheme in the poems recited and the songs played during their ceremonies; etc., etc. “Ostensibly, unless all this is only coincidence,” said Saim, “unless God is playing a cruel epistolic joke on me, then I’d have to be blind not to see that the logogriphs and the anagrams the Bektaşis took over from the Hurufis are, without any doubt, being reiterated in the leftist publications.” In the silence which was unbroken except for the whistles of the night watchmen in distant quarters, Saim slowly began to recite for Galip the word games he’d figured out, lining them up with their secondary meanings, as if he were repeating his prayers.
Much later, somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, in the wee hours when he went back and forth between dreams of Rüya and memories of happier times, Galip became aware of Saim saying: “the most striking aspect and the essence of the subject…” and began to pay attention. The kids who joined political factions, Saim was saying, had no idea they’d turned Bektaşi. Since the whole thing was cooked up between the party middle management and the Bektaşi masters in Albania, those in the rank and file were completely unaware; all those well-intentioned altruistic kids who joined up at the cost of abandoning their daily habits and altering their entire lives from tip to toe had no clue that their photos taken at the ceremonies and rituals, the marches and meals, were all evaluated by some dervishes in Albania as an extension of their own order. “At first, in my innocence, I thought it was a terrible conspiracy, an incredible secret, that these kids were being hoodwinked despicably,” Saim went on. “So much so that, in the first flush of excitement, for the first time in fifteen years I thought of putting it all on paper, down to the last detail, and publishing it, but I decided against it immediately.” In the snowy silence, listening for a while to the moan of a dark tanker sailing through the Bosphorus, the sound reverberating lightly on the casements of the entire city, he added: “I have finally understood that nothing can be changed by proving that the life we lead is someone else’s dream.”
Then Saim told the story of the Zeriban tribe who settled on an inaccessible mountain in Eastern Anatolia and for the next two hundred years prepared for the journey that would take them to Mount Kaf. The idea of going on the journey to the mythic Mount Kaf, a journey on which they’d never set forth, had come from a dream book published three hundred and twenty years ago. What would be changed by informing the members of the tribe that their spiritual leaders, who handed down the truth from generation to generation as if it were a secret, had already made a deal with the Ottomans stipulating that the trip to Mount Kaf would never be made? It would be like trying to explain to the soldiers who crowd into small-town movie houses on Sunday afternoons that the scheming priest on the screen who tries to get the brave Turkish warrior to drink poisoned wine is only a humble actor who, in real life, is devoted to Islam. Where would it get you? You’d end up depriving these people of their sole pleasure, the pleasure of getting mad.
Toward morning, as Galip drowsed on the sofa, Saim was busy soliloquizing that, in all probability, the elderly Bektaşi masters in Albania who got together with the party leadership in the dreamlike empty ballroom of a white colonial hotel left over from the turn of the century, looking through tearful eyes at the photos of the Turkish youths, had no inkling that it wasn’t the mysteries of the order that were being recited at the ceremonies, but exuberant Marxist-Leninist analyses. For the alchemists, not knowing that they’d never be able to transmute matter into gold was not their misfortune but their reason for being. No matter how much the modern illusionist revealed the tricks of his trade, the fervent audience was still gratified in persuading itself, for a moment, that this was not a deception but a brush with sorcery. A whole lot of young people, too, fell in love under the influence of some talk they’d heard at some period of their lives, or in a story, or a book they’d shared; they married their flames in a fever and, never comprehending the fallacy that lay behind their romance, merrily spent the rest of their lives. As Saim’s wife cleared the table of periodicals in order to set the table for breakfast, Saim, while he glanced at the daily paper that had been slipped under the door, was still carrying on about how nothing could be changed by the knowledge that everything that’s written, everything in the authoritative texts, alludes not to life but, simply by virtue of having been written, alludes to some dream.
I asked him about his enemies: He recounted, recounted, and recounted.
—
Conversations with Yahya Kemal
His funeral turned out exactly as he feared, as he’d predicted it thirty-two years ago: one inmate and one orderly from the small nursing home for the indigent, one retired journalist who’d been his protégé when he was at the height of his career as a columnist, two confused relatives who had no knowledge of the writer’s life and work, one bizarre-looking Greek dowager wearing a hat with a gauzy veil and a brooch that resembled a sultan’s aigrette, the reverend imam, myself, and the body in the coffin. We were nine in all. The coffin was lowered into the ground during yesterday’s snowstorm, so the imam hurried through the prayers, and the rest of us were in a rush to scatter earth into the grave. Then, before I knew it, we were all on our way. At the Kısıklı stop, there was no one waiting for the streetcar besides me. Once I crossed over to this side, I went up to Beyoğlu where Edward G. Robinson’s
Scarlet Street
was playing at the Alhambra. I went in and gave myself the thrill of seeing it. I’ve always loved Edward G. Robinson. Here he plays a failed bureaucrat and an amateur painter, who acquires ritzy duds and identity and pretends to be a billionaire, hoping to impress his love object. But it turns out that his sweetheart, Joan Bennett, has cheated on him all along. He gets two-timed, grief-stricken, destroyed, and we get depressed watching him suffer.
