The Black Book (16 page)

“But it turns out we like Galip,” the magazine writer said. “We detected something of our own youth in him. We took him to our hearts enough to give away all these confidences. That’s how we know what’s what. Her ladyship Samiye Samim, a brilliant star a while back, once told me during her last days at a nursing home: ‘The disease called jealousy…’ What? Are you leaving, young man?”

“Galip, my son, now that you’re leaving, answer me this one question,” the old columnist said. “Why in hell does British TV want to interview Jelal and not me?”

“Because he’s the better writer,” Galip said. He’d risen from the table and was about to step into the silent corridor that led to the stairs. He heard the old writer shout after him with a powerful voice that had lost nothing of its gusto.

“Did you really think what you swallowed was a stomach pill?”

Galip looked around him carefully when he got out on the street. On the opposite sidewalk, on the corner where the seminary school students had once burned the paper that contained the column of Jelal’s they considered blasphemous, an orange vendor and a bald-headed man stood around aimlessly. There didn’t seem to be anyone waiting around for Jelal. He went across and bought an orange. Peeling the orange and eating it, he was gripped by a feeling that somebody was following him. At Cağaloğlu Square he turned to go to his office, still not having figured out why he was spooked at that very moment. He walked down the street slowly, looking into bookstore windows, but he didn’t get anywhere analyzing why the feeling seemed so real. It felt as if there was the vague presence of an “eye” just behind his neck, that’s all.

Slowing down as he passed by one of the bookstores, his eyes met another pair of eyes in the window which, the moment they met, excited him as if he’d realized how fond he’d been of an intimate all along. This was the window of the publishing house that printed most of the detective novels that Rüya read as if she were gulping them down. The treacherous little owl he often noticed on the novels now patiently watched Galip and the Saturday crowds that went by the store window. Galip went in the store and had them wrap up three old volumes he didn’t think Rüya had read and another one called
Women, Love, and Whiskey
which was being advertised as the publication of the week. A largish poster tacked on one of the upper shelves said: “No other series in Turkey has ever reached Number 126: Our Number is the guarantee of the quality of our Detective Novels.” The store sold other books besides the “Literary Romances” and the “Owl Series of Humorous Novels” also published by the same house, so he inquired if they had a book on Hurufism. A stocky old man, who sat in the chair he’d placed in the doorway from where he managed to watch simultaneously the pale young man at the register and the crowd that went by on the muddy sidewalk, gave him the answer he expected.

“We don’t carry it. Ask for it at Stingy Ismail’s store.” Then he added: “Some time ago I got hold of the rough drafts of detective novels translated from the French by the Crown Prince the Honorable Osman Jelalettin who happened to be a Hurufi himself. Do you know how he got killed?”

Outside the store, Galip looked up and down both sidewalks but didn’t see anything that might attract his attention: a woman and her kid whose coat was too big studying the window of the sandwich shop, two schoolgirls who wore identical green socks, and an old man in a brown coat waiting to cross the street. But as soon as he began walking toward his office, he felt the same watchful “eye” on his neck.

Galip, who’d never been followed nor been gripped by a feeling of being followed, was limited to the films he’d seen, or scenes in Rüya’s detective novels, for his expertise on the subject. Although he’d read only a few detective novels, he often ranted and raved about the genre: it should be possible to construct a novel in which the first and last chapters were identical; somebody should write a story that had no “ending” because the real ending had been concealed somewhere in the text; there ought to be a novel imagined where all the characters were blind, etc., etc. Constructing these premises Rüya turned up her nose at, Galip dreamed that perhaps someday he could become some other person.

He imagined that the legless beggar ensconced in the alcove next to the entrance to the office building was blind in both eyes; that’s when he decided that the nightmare he was becoming increasingly involved in must be due to a lack of sleep as much as Rüya’s absence. Upon entering his office, instead of sitting at his desk, he opened the window and looked down. He watched all movement on the sidewalk for a short period. When he sat at his desk, his hand went, seemingly on its own, not to the telephone but to a folder that contained paper. He took out a fresh sheet. He began to write without doing too much thinking.

“Places where Rüya might be: Her ex-husband’s house. My uncle’s house. Banu’s house. A ‘safe’ house. A semi-safe house. A house where poetry is discussed. A house where anything is discussed. Some other house in Nişantaşı. Any old house. A house.” Realizing he wasn’t thinking well while he wrote, he put the pencil down. Then he picked up the pencil again and struck out all the possibilities aside from “Her ex-husband’s house,” and he wrote this: “Places where Rüya and Jelal might be: One of Jelal’s hideouts. Rüya and Jelal in a hotel room. Rüya and Jelal going to a movie theater. Rüya and Jelal? Rüya and Jelal?”

Writing on paper gave him an impression that he resembled the heroes of all those detective novels he’d projected; consequently, he felt as if he was approaching the entrance of a door that was suggestive of Rüya, a new world, and the new person he wanted to become. The world glimpsed through the door was a world where the sensation of being followed was serenely accepted. If a person believed that he was being followed, then he must at least believe he was someone capable of sitting down at his desk and making a list of all the clues necessary to find another person who had vanished. Galip knew he was nothing like a hero in a detective novel, but presuming that he resembled that person, or being “like him,” somewhat lightened the oppression of the objects and the stories that beset him. Some time later when the young waiter, whose hair was parted in the middle with an astonishing symmetry, served the meal he’d ordered brought in from the restaurant, Galip’s world so closely approximated the world of the detective novels that, now that he had filled sheets of paper with clues, the dish of pilav topped with gyros and the carrot salad which sat on the dirty tray no longer seemed the same old stuff he always ate but had become unusual fare that he was seeing for the first time.

The phone rang in the middle of his meal. He picked it up like someone who was expecting the call: wrong number. After he finished eating and got rid of the tray, he called his own apartment in Nişantaşı. He let the phone ring a long time, imagining Rüya, who’d returned home tired, getting out of bed, but he wasn’t surprised when no one answered, either. He dialed Aunt Halé’s number.

Hoping to forestall new questions from his aunt, Galip ran through explanations in one breath: Their phone was out of order and that’s why they couldn’t get in touch; Rüya had recovered that same night, she was right as rain, nothing the matter with her at all, there she was in her purple coat, pleased with herself, sitting in the ’56 Chevvy taxicab, waiting for Galip; they were about to take off on a trip to Izmir, to see an old friend who was seriously ill; the boat would sail shortly, Galip was calling from a grocery store on the way; he thanked the grocer who let him use the phone when the store was really jumping; goodbye, Aunt, goodbye! But Aunt Halé still managed to ask: Did they make sure the door was locked, had Rüya taken along her green sweater?

When Saim called, Galip had been wondering if a person could change significantly by staring at the map of a city where he’d never set foot. Saim said he had continued researching in his archives after Galip left in the morning and had come across some clues that might be useful: this Mehmet Yılmaz who was responsible for the old lady’s death, yes, he was possibly still alive, didn’t go under the names of either Ahmet Kaçar or Haldun Kara as they had previously supposed, but went around town like a ghost calling himself Muammer Ergener which didn’t smack of a pseudonym at all. When he came across this name in a publication that espoused totally “opposing views,” Saim was not surprised; what surprised him was that another person, who went under the name of Salih Gölbaşı, had used the same prose style and made the same spelling errors in two pieces sharply criticizing a couple of Jelal’s columns. After reasoning through that the first and the last name both rhymed with Rüya’s ex-husband’s first and last names, besides being made up of the same consonants, he saw the person’s name now listed in a small educational publication called
The Hour of Labor
as the editor-in-chief; so Saim had secured for Galip the address of the editorial offices, which were on the western outskirts of the city: Refet Bey Street, No. 13, Sunny Heights, Sinan Paşa, Bakırköy.

Following the phone conversation, Galip located the map of the Sinan Paşa District in the City Directory. He was amazed: the Sunny Heights development covered the whole area of the barren hill where Rüya had moved into a squatter’s shack with her ex-husband, twelve years ago when they were first married, so that the husband could conduct his “studies” on laborers. Galip examined the map and figured out that the hill that he had once visited had been subdivided into streets each named after a hero of the War of Independence. In one corner, there was a square indicated by the green of a small park, the minaret of a mosque, and the tiny oblong of a statue of Atatürk. This was a realm that Galip wouldn’t have dreamed of in a thousand years.

He called up the paper and was informed that Jelal hadn’t arrived yet, then he phoned İskender. He told İskender that he’d located Jelal, that he’d told him British TV wanted to interview him, that Jelal didn’t seem opposed to the idea, but that he was too busy at this particular time. And while he ran through his story, he could hear a little girl crying on the other end, not too far away from the telephone. İskender told him that the British would be in Istanbul for six more days at least. They’d been hearing good things about Jelal, so he was sure they’d wait; if Galip wished, he could look them up at the Pera Palas Hotel himself.

He put the lunch tray in front of the door and left the building; as he walked down the hill toward the sea, he noticed that the sky was a paler color than he’d ever seen it before. It seemed about to snow down ashes, and yet the Saturday crowd would probably act as if that were par for the course. Perhaps that was why people walked along the muddy streets looking at their feet; they were hoping to get used to the idea. He sensed that the detective novels under his arm calmed him down. Perhaps it was thanks to their having been written in distant, magical countries and translated into “our tongue” by unhappy housewives who regretted not continuing the training they began in one of the foreign-language high schools that now everybody could go about his business as usual, so that the peddlers in faded suits who refill lighters at the entrances to business buildings, the hunchbacked men who look like old colorless rags, and the silent passengers at the
dolmuş
stops could all keep on breathing their usual breaths.

He got on the bus in Eminönü and off at Harbiye, not far from the apartment, where he saw the crowd in front of the Palace Theater. The crowd was waiting for the 2:45 Saturday afternoon movie. Twenty years ago, amidst an identical trenchcoated and pimpled crowd of students, Galip too would come to this matinee with Rüya and her other schoolmates; he’d descend the stairs, which were covered with sawdust then as they were now, examine the tinted stills of the coming attractions lit by tiny bulbs, and, quietly patient, he’d watch to see just who Rüya was talking to. The previous showing seemed never to end, the doors never to open, and the moment he and Rüya would sit side-by-side when the lights went out never seemed to come. Today, when he found there were still tickets available for the 2:45 show, Galip was gripped by a sense of freedom. Inside the theater, the air left over from the previous audience was hot and close. Galip knew he’d fall asleep as soon as the lights went off and the ads came on.

The moment he awoke, he sat up in his seat. On the screen was a beautiful woman, a real beauty, who was as troubled as she was beautiful. Then came a scene of a wide and tranquil river, a farmhouse, an American farm set in dense greenery. Then, the troubled beautiful girl began talking to a middle-aged man Galip had never seen before in any movie. He could see the deep trouble that beset their lives in their faces and in their gestures, which were as slow and placid as their speech. It was beyond mere understanding: he
knew.
Life was full of trouble, pain, deep misery which made our faces alike, pain that just as we got used to it surpassed itself with new pain that was much worse. Even when miseries arrived suddenly, we knew that they had always been on the way; we’d readied ourselves, but still, when trouble beset us like a nightmare, we found ourselves seized by a kind of loneliness, a hopeless and addictive loneliness, and imagined that sharing it with others would make us happy. For a moment Galip felt that his trouble and the trouble of the woman on the screen were the same—maybe it wasn’t trouble they had in common but a world, an orderly world where you never expected too much, which never turned away from you, which summoned you to be humble. Galip felt so close to the woman that it was as if he were watching himself as he watched her fetch water out of a well, take a trip in an old Ford pickup, talk to the child in her lap as she was getting him ready for bed. What made him want to embrace her was not the woman’s beauty, her artlessness, or her forthright attitude, it was the belief that he lived in her world: were he able to embrace her, the slender woman with light brown hair could have shared his belief. Galip felt as if he were watching the movie all by himself, as if what he saw could be seen by no one else. Soon, though, when a fight broke out in the sultry town divided by a wide asphalt road, and a male who was the “strong and dominant type” took matters in hand, Galip knew that he was about to lose the partnership he shared with the woman. He read the subtitles word by word; he could feel the fidgeting humanity in the theater. He rose and walked home under the snow that fell slowly from a sky that was nearly dark.