The Black Book (20 page)
Authors: Orhan Pamuk
Might Mr. Galip possibly give his revisionist history a chance? In case he had trouble finding his way back to the main street by himself, might the host accompany him there? In the same vein, when might Galip visit again? Very well, then, might he send Rüya his best regards?
The habit of perusing periodical works may be properly added to Averroës’ catalogue of Anti-Mnemonics, or weakeners of the memory.
—
COLERIDGE
,
Biographia Literaria
He asked me to give you his regards two weeks ago, to be exact. “I sure will,” I said, but by the time I got in the car I’d already managed to forget, not the regards but the man who sent them. I haven’t lost any sleep over it, though. In my opinion, any smart husband ought to push those men who send his wife their regards out of his memory. After all, you never know, do you? Especially if your wife happens to be a housewife, that unfortunate person whose circle consists of relatives and shopkeepers, and who has no way of knowing any man besides her tedious husband her entire life. Should someone send her his regards, she might be inclined to think about this gentle individual; she has the time. When you come right down to it, men of this sort are truly urbane. But since when did we acquire such customs anyway? In the good old days, a gentleman might at most send his regards to an impersonal, nebulous harem. Oldtime streetcars were better too.
Even those readers who know that I am not married, have never been married, and on account of my profession will never be married, probably suspect by now that this column, beginning with the opening sentence, is a puzzle that I have devised for them. Just who is this woman whom I address so intimately? Hocus-pocus! Your aging columnist is about to harp on the slow loss of his memory, inviting you to smell the last fading roses in the garden, if you get my meaning. But stand back, so that we can easily pull off our garden-variety sleight of hand without giving away the trick.
Approximately thirty years ago, during my early days as a cub reporter on the Beyoğlu beat, I’d go from door to door in search of a scoop. I’d look for fresh love stories that culminated in death or suicide at the casinos where Beyoğlu gangsters and drug kingpins hang out. I’d go from hotel to hotel, looking through guest registers that hotel clerks let me see—a privilege for which I plunked down two-and-a-half lira notes every month—to sniff out foreign celebrities, or an interesting person from the West whom I could palm off as a foreign celebrity visiting our city. Back in those days, not only did the world not overflow with celebrities, none of them ever showed up in Istanbul. When people that I presented in my paper as celebrities in their own countries but who were not saw their photos in print, they were thrown into a confusion that always ended in disaffection. One among them for whom I had predicted fame and glory eventually achieved real celebrity, becoming a truly famous French—and existentialist—fashion designer twenty years after the appearance of the news that “so-and-so, the famous couturier, visited our city yesterday.” But not a word of thanks to me. That’s what you get for gratitude from the West.
Regarding those days when I was busy with unqualified celebrities and domestic gangsters (called the mafia these days): I once came across an elderly pharmacist who showed promise as a news story. This man was stricken with insomnia and forgetfulness, which are afflictions that I now suffer from myself. The most horrible aspect of suffering from both of these at the same time is the mistaken notion that it is possible to compensate for one (insomnia) with the other (forgetfulness) when what actually goes on is quite the opposite. During the sleepless nights when neither night nor time would pass, frozen in a world without identity, personality, color, or smell, his memories escaped him so badly (just like mine) that the old man thought he was all alone on the “other side of the moon” referred to so often in magazine articles translated from foreign publications.
The old man had invented a drug in his laboratory (as I have invented prose for the same purpose) in the hope of curing his affliction. At a press conference where a pothead reporter from an evening paper and I were the only two in attendance (the pharmacist made the third), the old man made a great show of pouring out his pink liquid and quaffing it repeatedly for the sake of presenting his drug to the public, thereby achieving at last the sleep he had yearned for all these many years. But since the old pharmacist, who was reunited with not only his sleep but his dreams of paradise, would never wake up again, the public never heard the news it’s so hungry for: that a Turk had also managed at last to invent something.
On the day of his funeral, a dark day a couple of days later, if memory serves me right, I kept wondering what it was that he had wanted to remember. I still wonder about it. As we grow older, what is it that our memory throws off like a petulant pack animal who refuses to carry the extra baggage? Is it the most unpleasant? The heaviest? Or the weight that falls off most easily?
Forgetting: I have forgotten how sunlight streamed on our bodies through gauze curtains in small rooms located in the most beautiful spots all over Istanbul. I have forgotten which movie theater entrance was worked by the scalper whose love for the pale Greek girl at the ticket window drove him mad. I have long forgotten the names of the dear readers, and the mystery I divulged to them in personal letters, who dreamed the same dreams as I did during the time I wrote the column interpreting dreams for their newspaper.
Then, years later, researching into time past, your columnist searches for a branch to hold on to in the middle of the night, and he remembers a horrific day he spent in the streets of Istanbul: My entire body, and my entire being, had been wracked by a desire to kiss someone on the lips.
Holed up in an old movie theater one Saturday afternoon, I had viewed an unprolonged kissing scene in an American detective flick (
Scarlet Street
), perhaps older than the theater itself. It was a run-of-the-mill kissing scene, no different than in other black-and-white films, where our censors had already lopped off anything longer than four seconds. I don’t quite know how it happened but I was seized by such a desire to kiss a woman the same way, yes, pressing my lips on hers with all my might, that I thought I’d choke on my own misery. I was twenty-four years old, and I had yet to kiss someone on the lips. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t slept with brothel whores, but not only were those women not prone to kissing, I wouldn’t have wanted to put my lips on theirs either.
Even before the film was over, I was out on the street, apprehensive and agitated as if some woman who wanted to kiss me were waiting for me somewhere in the city. I remember walking at a run to the subway, then hurrying back to Beyoğlu, trying hopelessly the whole time, as if looking for something in the dark, to fetch up the memory of a face, a smile, a woman’s image. I couldn’t come up with an acquaintance or a relative I could kiss on the lips; I had no hope of ever finding myself a sweetheart; I knew of no one who could be my … lover! The city that teemed with people seemed totally empty.
Come what may, I still found myself on a bus soon after arriving at Taksim Square. Some distant relatives on my mother’s side had taken an interest in us during the years when my father had left us; I had played jacks a few times with their daughter who was a couple of years younger than I. When I rang their doorbell at Fındıkzade an hour later, I suddenly recalled that the girl I dreamed of kissing had been married some time ago. I was invited in by the elderly parents, who have long since passed away. They seemed to be surprised and bewildered as to why I had shown up after all these years. We chitchatted about this and that (they showed no interest in me as a journalist, a profession they considered little better than gossip-mongering), took tea and ate sesame bagels while we listened to the soccer game on the radio. They expected wholeheartedly for me to stay for supper too, but suddenly, mumbling something, I excused myself and bolted out onto the street.
I was still burning up with the desire to kiss when I felt the cold air outdoors on my skin. My skin cold as ice but my flesh and blood on fire, I was suffering from a deep and unbearable discomfort.
Taking the ferryboat at Eminönü, I crossed over to Kadıköy. A schoolmate used to tell tales about a girl in his neighborhood who was a known kisser (that is, known to give kisses before she got married). As I walked to his place at Fenerbahçe I was thinking that my friend must know other girls like her, even if she herself were not available. I went round and round the wood-frame mansions and the cypress gardens where my friend used to live, but I just couldn’t find his place. I kept looking into lighted windows as I walked by the old wood structures that have long been torn down, imagining that the girl who was a kisser before she got married lived in one of them. Looking up to a window, I’d say to myself, “There she is, the girl who will kiss me on the lips.” There was no great distance between us, just a garden wall, a door, some wooden stairs.
Yet I could not reach her and kiss her. At that moment, how near yet how distant was that kiss! As scary as it was attractive! That mysterious, weird, unbelievable kiss that everyone knew about, yet was as strange and magical as a dream!
Aboard the ferry back to the European side, I remember wondering what would happen if I kissed some woman by force. Or what if I pretended my lips for a moment touched hers accidentally? But on top of not being in any condition to think things through carefully, I did not see a suitable face anywhere around me. There had been periods in my life when I was seized, painfully and hopelessly, by a feeling of the city’s emptiness, even as I breathed the same air as the city’s crowds, but never had I felt it as powerfully as I did that day.
Pounding the damp sidewalks for quite some time, I kept thinking that I would surely get what I wanted someday when, having achieved fame and glory, I returned to this totally empty city. At the moment, however, your columnist had no other respite than returning to the house where he lived with his mother, to read Balzac’s account of poor Rastignac in Turkish translation. Back in those days, I used to read books like a real Young Turk, that is, not for my personal pleasure but out of a sense of duty to prepare myself for the future. But the future could not save the day!
After secluding myself in my room for a while, I reemerged impatiently. I remember looking into the bathroom mirror as I visualized the actors in the movie, thinking a person could at least kiss himself in the mirror. At any rate, I could not get the image of actors’ lips (Joan Bennett’s and Dan Duryea’s) out of my mind. Even so, I would not be kissing myself but the glass. So I left. My mother was sitting at the table among patterns and pieces of silk chiffon obtained from God knew what wealthy relation of a distant relative, trying to get an evening dress made in time for some wedding.
Reviewing my plans for the future, I began explaining things to her, most probably stories and daydreams that involved my successes and desires. But my mother wasn’t listening to me heart and soul. I realized that what was important to her was not what I said, no matter what it was; what was important was the fact that I was sitting at home on Saturday night, chatting with her. I was furious. For some reason her hair was well groomed that evening, and her lips were lightly dabbed with lipstick. I stared at my mother’s lips, at her mouth that was often said to resemble mine; I was dumbstruck.
“There’s a strange look in your eyes,” she said apprehensively. “What is it?”
My mother and I fell silent for a time. Then I began walking toward her but stopped dead in my tracks. My legs were trembling. Without getting any closer, I began to shout with all my might. I cannot remember clearly now what it was that I was saying, but before we knew it, we were having one of our terrible fights. We had suddenly lost all fear of being overheard by the neighbors. It was one of those moments of anger when one loses all inhibition and lets it rip. In situations like this, either a teacup gets broken or else the stove barely misses being knocked over.
Eventually, I was able to tear myself away and storm out the door. My mother sat weeping among the pieces of silk chiffon, spools of thread, and imported dressmaker’s pins (the first Turkish-made pins were manufactured in 1976 under the trademark of Horseman). I beat the sidewalks all over the city until midnight. I went in the courtyard of the Mosque of Süleyman the Magnificent, crossed the Atatürk Bridge, went up to Beyoğlu. It was as if I were not myself; I felt as if the specter of rage and vengeance were pursuing me; the person I was supposed to be seemed to be on my trail.
Next, I found myself sitting at a pudding shop just to be around other people. But I did not look at anyone for fear of catching the eye of someone who was also trying to fill up the eternity of a Saturday night. People like me recognize each other immediately, only to feel contempt for one another. Not too long after, a man and his wife stopped by my table, and the husband began to talk to me. What was this white-haired ghost doing among my memories?
Turns out, he was the old schoolmate whose house I was unable to find in Fenerbahçe. Not only was he married, he worked for the State Railways, had become prematurely gray, and remembered the good old days only too well. You know how an old friend will astonish you by falling all over you, pretending that he shares with you a great many memories and secrets, just to make his own past sound interesting for the benefit of a wife or companion who’s standing next to him. Well, I wasn’t taken in. But I wouldn’t play the role that made his trumped-up reminiscences more interesting, either. There was no way that I was admitting to being still stuck in the same old sad and miserable life that he himself had long left behind.
Spooning up my unsweetened pudding as I gave them the scoop, I confessed that I myself had been married for quite some time, that you were waiting for me at home, that I had parked my Chevvy at Taksim and had walked here to pick up the chicken-breast pudding you had a sudden craving for, that we lived in Nişantaşı, and that I could drop them off somewhere on my way. He thanked me, but no, seeing how he still lived in Fenerbahçe. He questioned me tentatively to satisfy his own curiosity at first, but then, when he found out that you came from “a good family,” he wanted to impress the wife with his familiarity with good families. Not letting the chance go to waste, I insisted that he must remember you. He did, gladly, and he sent you his regards. As I left the shop, the container with the chicken-breast pudding in my hand, first I kissed him and then, aping the breezy Western manner in the movies, I kissed his wife. What a bunch of oddball readers you are! What an oddball country!
